Katherine Butler Brown

Katherine Butler Brown is a cultural historian and ethnomusicologist whose work focuses on South Asia. She trained as a viola player before embarking on postgraduate work at SOAS in the cultural history of North Indian music, followed by a research fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a lectureship at Leeds. Katherine’s research interests lie in the areas of South Asian music, the history of Mughal India (1526-1858), music and Islam, and music and empire. They include the intersection of music with politics, gender, friendship, love and sexuality, medicine and ethics; the history of pleasure; patronage and connoisseurship; social liminality; female and male courtesans; the social history of North Indian performers; and Indo-Persian musical writings. Katherine also has emerging interests in female vocalists; Muslim devotional sound-art; and musical transitions to European colonialism in the Indian Ocean region.
Currently, Katherine is preparing a monograph on the cultural history of music, musicians and their patrons in Mughal North India, entitled The place of pleasure: Hindustani music in Mughal society, 1593-1707. She is a Fellow and Member of Council of the Royal Asiatic Society, and a Committee Member of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology.

“The origins and early development of khayal.” In J Bor, F Delvoye, J Harvey and E te Nijenhuis, eds. Hindustani music: thirteenth to twentieth centuries. New Delhi: Manohar (2010).

“The social liminality of musicians: case studies from Mughal India and beyond,” twentieth-century music 3/1 (2007), pp. 13-49.

“Did Aurangzeb ban music? Questions for the historiography of his reign,” Modern Asian Studies 41/1 (2007), pp. 77-121.

“If music be the food of love: masculinity and eroticism in the Mughal mehfil.” In Francesca Orsini, ed. Love in South Asia: a cultural history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2006).

“Evidence of Indo-Persian musical synthesis? The tanbur and rudra vina in seventeenth-century Indo-Persian treatises,” Journal of the Indian Musicological Society 36-7 (2006), pp. 89-103.

“The that system of seventeenth-century North Indian ragas: a preliminary report on the treatises of Kamilkhani,” Asian Music 35/1 (2003/4), pp. 1-13.