Professor Bettina Varwig

Bettina is one of our Official Fellows, and is Director of Studies in Music. At the University she is Professor of Music History.

Biography

Originally from Germany, Bettina took her undergraduate degree in Music at King's College, London. She completed her PhD at Harvard University in 2006, and returned to the UK to take up a Fellowship by Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford until 2008. She then moved to the University of Cambridge in 2008 for a British Academy Fellowship at Girton College. She was appointed Lecturer in Music at King’s College London in 2009 (Senior Lecturer from 2013). She joined the Faculty of Music at Cambridge in 2017. She specialises in music of the early modern period.

Research

Bettina's research interests concern the history of music, the body, the emotions and the senses in European early modernity. She has published widely on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Heinrich Schütz and their contemporaries, exploring issues of embodiment, performance, listening and musical rhetoric, as well as historiography and reception, in particular the afterlives of J. S. Bach in the twentieth and twenty–first centuries. In her current work, she enjoys exploring the fascinating intersections between early modern thought and aspects of current scholarship in affect theory, sound studies, music psychology and embodied cognition. Her latest monograph (Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Musical Physiology, Chicago 2023) develops a corporeal history of early modern music. It explores how music and its powerful impact on animate beings shaped contemporary ideas about human nature, its physiology and psychology; and how these past musical practices can aid in fostering alternative modes of being in the body and in the world today.