Lieber's primary area of research is in the area of synagogue poetry ("piyyut") from Late Antiquity and the Byzantine period. She examines these works from a variety of perspectives, including literary, performative, and comparative (particularly with early Christian hymnography in Syriac and Greek), and also as a genre of early Jewish biblical interpretation. In recent years, she has begun to integrate the study of material culture into my analysis of these literary works, as part of taking a more fully "contextual" approach to literary analysis. Her most recent work approaches late ancient hymnography through the lens of theater studies and performance.