Craig Patterson's research interests include 19th and 20th century Spanish intellectual history, and Galician literature and culture, especially in relation to the history of ideas and Galician cultural identity.

He has published several articles and a book on the Galician writer and intellectual Ramón Otero Pedrayo, which has been translated into a Galician edition. His current research concerns the employment of cultural history and ideas as an imaginative formulation of cultural identity within a Peninsular and Hispanic context, and specifically relating to Galicia. This interest has led him to focus on the response of Galician writers to the philosophy and fiction of the 'Generation of 1898', as well as other relationships between Galician identity and Peninsular artists as a process of intercultural dialogue against the backdrop of wider international Modernism. He is the President of the International Association of Galician Studies and corresponding member of the Real Academia Galega.

He is currently completing the first English-language edition of Sempre en Galiza (1944), by the Galician nationalist writer and politician, Alfonso Daniel Rodríguez Castelao, and preparing a monograph on the same writer within the framework of postcolonial theory