Katherine Butler Schofield

Katherine Schofield is a historian of music & listening in Mughal India and the paracolonial Indian Ocean c. 1590–1860, and Head of the Department of Music at King’s College London. Through stories about musicians and their patrons drawn from Persian, Urdu & visual sources, she writes about sovereignty & selfhood, affection & desire, sympathy & loss, and power, worldly & strange. Katherine was the Principal Investigator of the first European Research Council Starting Grant for music in the UK (2011–16) and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow in 2018. She is the co-editor of two volumes of essays: Monsoon Feelings: A History of Emotions in the Rain (2018) andTellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India (2015); and her latest book, Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858, is published by Cambridge University Press (2023). Katherine is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Historical Society.