He was formerly a lecturer in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin and dramaturg for the Butler Opera Center. His research focuses on opera production and its history, musical theater, German theater, and opera recording. He received his doctorate in theatre from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation “The Theatrical Collaborators of Richard Strauss: Networks, Materials, and Cultural Politics” was supported by a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service and charted the composer’s development as a theatrical practitioner through case studies of significant albeit overlooked artistic relationships. Fusing theatre studies and musicology, Dr. Prendergast has presented his work at national conferences of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the American Musicological Society, the Mid-America Theatre Conference, and the International Richard Strauss Society. He was a contributor to the 2020 volume Richard Strauss in Context from Cambridge University Press.