Faculty Member, Music
Lecturer
About
A cultural historian and ethnomusicologist, Katherine Butler Brown joined King’s College London 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. Currently, she is 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. 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.
Contact Information
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/depts/music/staff/brown.html
