Dr Katherine Butler Schofield

Katherine Schofield is a historian of music and listening in Mughal India and the paracolonial Indian Ocean. Working with Persian, Urdu, and visual sources for elite musical culture in North India and the Deccan c.1570–1860, Katherine’s research interests lie in South Asian music, visual art, and cinema; the history of Mughal India; Islam and Sufism; empire and the paracolonial; musicians at risk; and the intersecting histories of the emotions, the senses, aesthetics, ethics, and the supernatural. She has been Principal Investigator of a European Research Council Starting Grant (2011–15/16) and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow (2018). Her books include Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858 (CUP, 2023), Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature, and Performance in North India, with Francesca Orsini (Open Book, 2015), and Monsoon Feelings: a History of Emotions in the Rain, with Imke Rajamani and Margrit Pernau (Niyogi, 2018).

Katherine trained as a viola player before embarking on postgraduate studies in Indian music history at SOAS University of London. She came to King’s in 2009 after a research fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a lectureship at Leeds. She was formerly known as Katherine Butler Brown.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Global Music History
• South and Southeast Asia
• Islam
• Empire and Colonialism
• Mughal India

Katherine has supervised over a dozen PhD students in the history, anthropology, and performances of South and Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern and North African musical cultures. She welcomes projects in the areas of global music history, Islam, empire and colonialism, musicians at risk, and the musical cultures of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore, the Indian Ocean, and/or their global diasporas.

Teaching

Katherine’s teaching interests lie in the music history and anthropology of South and Southeast Asia, Islam, and the Mughal and British empires; global music history; music and religion; and Hindi cinema. Her recent postgraduate and undergraduate teaching has included such topics as music and empire, Bollywood sounds, Indian classical music, music in Muslim cultures, and global music histories.

Expertise and Public Engagement

Katherine is sought after as a speaker on the arts and culture of Mughal, Deccani, and early colonial South Asia, and as a consultant on the material culture of South Asian music c.1600–1900, especially Persian and Urdu manuscripts, musical paintings, and period instruments. As well as presenting guest lectures at academic institutions and conferences all over the world, she has been a speaker at the Jaipur Literature Festival, the Lahore Literary Festival, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the British Library. She is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, a member of the International Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and has been a consultant to the Asian Music Circuit and the Horniman Museum, London, among others. Since the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in August 2021, Katherine has become a prominent advocate for the rights of Afghanistan's musicians, music professors, and other creative and cultural workers, as co-founder and strategy lead of the International Campaign for Afghanistan's Musicians. Katherine is the process of establishing the Musicians, Artists and Writers At Risk Network (MAWARN) at King's College London, to act as a hub for practice- and policy-oriented research on and by creative workers at risk.