Professor Bettina Varwig

I am Professor of Music History at the Faculty of Music and Fellow of Emmanuel College. Previously I was Senior Lecturer in Music at King’s College London, where I also took my undergraduate degree. I completed my doctoral studies at Harvard University in 2006, followed by a Fellowship by Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge and Girton College. I joined the Faculty at Cambridge in my current post in 2017.

My research is grounded in my fascination with the powers of music(king) to affect and transform its participants. I have pursued this fascination in different guises across the history of European early modernity and beyond, exploring issues of musical affect and expression; the history of the body, the senses and the emotions; and practices of musical listening and performance. The music of J. S. Bach has formed a recurring point of reference in these endeavours. I have also worked on issues of reception and historiography, in particular Bach reception in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I am invested in interdisciplinary dialogue of all stripes, enjoying exchange and collaboration with colleagues in history, philosophy, theology, sound studies, history of science and music psychology. I am also passionate about working with performers, using historical insights as a stimulus for creative transformation of these early modern repertories in performance today. 

I am the author of two monographs: Histories of Heinrich Schütz (Cambridge, 2011) and Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Musical Physiology (Chicago, 2023), which received the 2024 Otto Kinkeldey Award  of the American Musicological Society. I am editor of Rethinking Bach (Oxford University Press, 2021), and of Heinrich Schütz’s Christmas Story and Zwölf Geistliche Gesänge for the Neue Schütz Ausgabe (Bärenreiter). I serve on the editorial boards of Eighteenth-Century Music, the Journal of Musicology, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and the American Bach Society. My work received the Jerome Roche Prize of the Royal Musical Association in 2013 and the William H. Scheide Prize of the American Bach Society in 2016. In 2025 I was awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association.