King's College London

Faculty Member, Music

Lecturer

About

A cultural historian and ethnomusicologist, Katherine Butler Schofield is Lecturer in Music at King’s College London. She specialises in Mughal India, and is currently the Principal Investigator of a €1.18M European Research Council grant, “Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean” (2011-14), which aims to produce a history of transitions from pre-colonial to colonial musical fields in India and the Malay peninsula c.1750-1900. Katherine is also an Affiliate of the King's India Institute.

Having trained originally as a viola player, Katherine embarked 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 generally 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 gender, friendship, love and ethics; the history of pleasure; colonial transitions; connoisseurship; social liminality; North Indian musicians, dancers and actors; pan-Islamicate genres like the ghazal; and Indo-Persian musical knowledge. She is currently 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. Katherine is a Fellow and Member of Council of the Royal Asiatic Society, and a Committee Member of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology.

You can visit her Musical Transitions blog at http://musicaltransitions.wordpress.com

(Katherine was formerly known as Katherine Butler Brown)

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