Professor Laura Tunbridge appointed to the Heather Professorship of Music
The Faculty of Music is delighted to announce that Professor Laura Tunbridge FBA MAE, Professor of Music in the Faculty of Music and Henfrey Fellow and Tutor in Music at St Catherine’s College, has been appointed to the Heather Professorship of Music with effect from 1 October 2025. Professor Tunbridge will be a fellow of Wadham College.
The Heather Professor is the senior academic in the Faculty of Music, taking a leadership role in the research, teaching and administration of the Faculty, as well as working on its strategic development. The appointment is made at an exciting moment for the Faculty when it moves next year from its current site to the purpose-built facilities of the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
The Chair was endowed by William Heather in the early 17th century. The first Heather Professor of Music was Richard Nicholson in 1626. Professor Tunbridge joins a long line of distinguished scholars and composers, including John Stainer, Hubert Parry, Joseph Kerman, Denis Arnold, Brian Trowell, Reinhard Strohm and Eric Clarke. She is the first woman to be elected to the Chair in its 400-year history.
Professor Tunbridge’s work focuses on the history, performance and reception of music in Europe and America in the 19th and 20th centuries. Books include Schumann’s Late Style (Cambridge, 2007), The Song Cycle (Cambridge, 2010), Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performance in New York and London between the World Wars (Chicago, 2018) and Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces (Viking, 2020), which was named by The Times as one of the books of the year. She is also active as a public speaker and broadcaster. In 2017 she was elected to the Directorium of the International Musicological Society. She was elected a Member of the Academia Europaea in 2020 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2021. She was also awarded the Dent Medal by the Royal Musical Association in 2021.
