In this paper we give an overview of results for modal logic which can be shown using techniques and methods from first-order logic and resolution. Because of the breadth of the area and the many applications we focus on the use of first-order resolution methods for modal logics. In addition to traditional propositional modal logics we consider more expressive PDL-like dynamic modal logics closely related to description logics. Without going into too much detail, we survey different ways of translating modal logics into first-order logic, we explore different ways of using first-order resolution theorem provers to solve a range of reasoning problems for modal logics, and we discuss a variety of results which have been obtained in the setting of first-order resolution.