Dr. Bettina S. Muehlenbeck studied piano, musicology, philosophy, English literature, and German literature at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf, as well as Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany. She received her Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance from the University of Wyoming and holds a Master of Arts and Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Bern, Switzerland. Her research and areas of interest include pianism and piano culture from the seventeenth century through the twentieth; nineteenth-century music and culture, including Romanticism and Victorianism; as well as historically informed performance practice and aesthetics. Dr. Muehlenbeck has published extensively on the English pianist-composer William Sterndale Bennett (1816–75) and his continental counterparts, including in her book William Sterndale Bennett – Von fernen Ländern und Menschen: Reisetagebücher 1836 bis 1842 with Wehrhahn Publishing House in Hannover, Germany. She is also the author of an invited contribution, On Musical Journeys: William Sterndale Bennett’s Diaries, 1836–1842, to a themed edition of Nineteenth-Century Music Review, published by Cambridge University Press in honor of Bennett’s bicentenary in 2016, as well as an invited article on Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and William Sterndale Bennett in Ad Parnassum. A Journal of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Instrumental Music, Ut Orpheus Edizioni, Bologna, Italy. She has also been a keynote presenter for the annual festival of the American Matthay Association for Piano.
Dr. Muehlenbeck has previously held various academic leadership and teaching positions, including: Director of Global Learning and Professor of Music and Humanities (Saint Francis University, Pennsylvania/Southern France), Senior Research Scholar at the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar (Germany), Director and Chief Academic Officer of Bowling Green State University-Salzburg (Austria), Consultant for International Programs and Partnerships (Gratz College, Philadelphia), Assistant Professor of the Arts in Honors (Grand Valley State University, Michigan), Assistant Professor of Musicology and Piano (University of Minnesota Duluth), and Research Scholar at the Robert and Clara Schumann Research Center in Düsseldorf (Germany). She has also been honored to serve as External Examiner in the Ph.D. Music Performance program in Piano at Monash University in Australia, as well as piano guest clinician at Mozarteum University Salzburg in Austria.