After taking up his first post as lecturer, then reader, in musicology at King's College London in 1982, he accepted a position at the University of Southampton in 1996 and was promoted to professor.

[9] He has been honoured by articles devoted to him in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians[10] and in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.

[13] Everist's publications focus on the Ars Antiqua, music drama in nineteenth-century France, and reception theory.

His previous monograph, Mozart's Ghosts: Haunting the Halls of Musical Culture (2012), investigates Mozart's reception in English, French, and German-speaking countries, and was reviewed as an "elegantly written, meticulously researched, anecdotally rich, intellectually and ethically subtle piece of scholarship".

In his Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, Cantum pulcriorem invenire: Thirteenth-Century Latin Poetry and Music (CPI), Everist and a team of specialists at the University of Southampton investigated the medieval Conductus (2010–2016).