The Dent Medal for 2025 is awarded to Professor Bettina Varwig (University of Cambridge). Professor Varwig is a leading scholar of early modern music, focussing on German musical cultures. Her major achievements include two monographs: Histories of Heinrich Schütz (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Music in the Flesh: an Early Modern Musical Physiology (University of Chicago Press, 2023), which received the Otto Kinkeldey award from the American Musicological Society for a book of exceptional merit. She edited the volume Rethinking Bach (Oxford University Press, 2021), as well Heinrich Schütz’s Christmas Story for the Heinrich Schütz Ausgabe (Bärenreiter Verlag, 2017), and has received both the William H. Schneide Prize of the American Bach Society (2017) and the Jerome Roche Prize from the Royal Musical Association (2013). Her research has also appeared in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Music, Music & Letters, The Journal of Musicology, Twentieth-Century Music, The Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and Representations.  

After completing a PhD at Harvard University in 2006, Varwig held a fellowship by examination at Magdalen College, Oxford, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, and a Senior Lectureship at King’s College London.  She has been Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Emmanuel College since 2017.