Katherine Butler Brown

A cultural historian and ethnomusicologist, Katherine Butler Brown has recently joined King’s following a lectureship at the University of Leeds. Having trained originally as a viola player, she embarked on postgraduate work at SOAS in the cultural history of North Indian music, followed by a research fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. 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, male friendship, love, sexuality, social class, and Indian medicine; patronage and musicianship; connoisseurship and the idea of classicism; social liminality; female and male courtesans; the social history of North Indian musicians, dancers and actors; and Indo-Persian writings on Hindustani music. Katherine also has interests in modern South Asian female vocalists; British Asian vernacular musics, particularly new Muslim devotional sounds; and transitions from the Mughal to the British empires as manifested in the North Indian musical field. Katherine is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, and was the 2003 recipient of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Charles Seeger Prize. In her spare time she sings folk and choral music, and occasionally still plays the fiddle.

Katherine is currently preparing a monograph on the cultural history of music, musicians and their patrons in Mughal North India, provisionally entitled The place of pleasure: Hindustani music in Mughal society, and a co-edited volume with Ruth Hellier-Tinoco on Female singers in contemporary global contexts. Also in preparation are articles on different aspects of connoisseurship, male friendship, and classicisation in medieval and early modern North India, and an article on “The clash of identities and the Muslim female diasporic voice.” Selected previous publications include:
 
“The origins and early development of khayal.” In J Bor, F Delvoye, J Harvey and E te Nijenhuis, eds. Essays on the history of North Indian music. New Delhi: Manohar (2008, forthcoming).
 
The Social Liminality of Musicians. Special issue of twentieth-century music, (2007) 3/1, co-edited with Laudan Nooshin.
 
“The social liminality of musicians: case studies from Mughal India and beyond,” twentieth-century music 3/1 (2007), pp. 13-49.
 
“Introduction: Liminality and the social location of musicians,” twentieth-century music 3/1 (2007), pp. 5-12.
 
“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.
 
“Dargah Quli Khan’s strange vision: Mughals, music, and the Muraqqa‘-i Dehli.” Occasional Papers Series. Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge University (2004).
 
“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.
 
Review essay
 
George E Ruckert Music in North India and T Viswanathan and Matthew Harp Allen Music in South India in World of Music 47/2 (2005).
 
Book reviews
 
Ruby Lal Domesticity and power in the early Mughal world in Journal of Asian Studies (2007).
 
Janaki Bakhle Two men and music: nationalism in the making of an Indian classical tradition in Journal of Asian Studies (2008).