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; music and 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), and is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Historical Society. 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 at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music before embarking on postgraduate studies in South Asian 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 two dozen PhD students in the history, anthropology, and performance 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, music and musicians at risk, and the musical cultures of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, 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 and early print, musical paintings, and period instruments. As well as presenting guest lectures at academic institutions and conferences all over the world and many online talks, she has been a speaker at the Jaipur Literature Festival, the Lahore Literary Festival, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the British Library. Examples of international board membership include serving on the International Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (2018–24), and the Journal of the American Musicological Society (2018–24). Among others, Katherine has been a consultant to the Asian Music Circuit, the Horniman Museum, the Manchester Museum, the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. 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 at risk.

Selected Publications

• Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
• With Imke Rajamani and Margrit Pernau, eds. Monsoon Feelings: A History of Emotions in the Rain. New Delhi: Niyogi, 2018.
• With Francesca Orsini, eds. Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature, and Performance in North India. Cambridge: Open Book, 2015.
• “Musical culture under Mughal patronage: the place of pleasure,” in Richard M Eaton & Ramya Sreenivasan, eds. The Oxford handbook to the Mughal empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
• “Reviving the golden age again: ‘classicization’, Hindustani music & the Mughals,” Ethnomusicology 54/3 (2010), pp. 484–517.