Laura Tunbridge
Fellow and Heather Professor of Music and Fellow
Biography
Professor Laura Tunbridge FBA MAE is appointed to the Heather Professorship of Music from 1 October 2025. 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 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 joined the Oxford Faculty of Music in 2014, having previously been Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester (2004-2014) and Lecturer at the University of Reading (2002-2004). She studied music as an undergraduate at The Queen’s College, Oxford, and gained a M.A. from the University of Nottingham and a PhD from Princeton University.
Professor Tunbridge’s work focuses on the history, performance and reception of music in Europe and America in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is active as a public speaker and broadcaster. In 2017 she was elected to the Directorium of the International Musicological Society. Professor Tunbridge 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.
Publications
Professor Tunbridge's 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.