Katherine Schofield

Working largely with Persian, Urdu, and visual sources for elite musical culture in North India and the Deccan c.1570–1860, Katherine’s general research interests lie in South Asian music; the history of Mughal India (1526–1858); Islam and Sufism; empire and the paracolonial; and the intersecting histories of the emotions, the senses, aesthetics, ethics, and the supernatural. Through stories about ill-fated courtesans, legendary musicians, and captivated patrons she writes on sovereignty and selfhood, affection and desire, sympathy and loss, and power, worldly and strange. 

In 2011–16 Katherine was Principal Investigator of a €1.18M European Research Council project studying the ways in which music and dance were transformed c.1750–1900 in the transition to colonial rule in India and the Malay world. She is the editor with Francesca Orsini of Tellings and texts: music, literature, and performance in North India (Open Book, 2015), and with Imke Rajamani and Margrit Pernau Monsoon feelings: a history of emotions in the rain (Niyogi, 2018). In 2018 she is a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow, presenting six public lectures and conversations at the British Library that will become a monograph, Histories of the ephemeral: writing on music in late Mughal India, 1748–1858.

This April, Katherine will be delivering a series of lectures:

The Illiterate Ustad and Other Myths 

Writing on Music in the Late Mughal World

1. The Mughal Orpheus: Remembering Khushhal Khan ‘Gunasamudra’ in Eighteenth-Century Delhi

2. The Rivals: Anjha Baras Khan, Adarang, and the Scattering of Shahjahanabad

3. Eclipsed by the Moon: Mahlaqa Bai and Khushhal Khan ‘Anup’ in Nizami Hyderabad

4. Guardian of the Flame: Miyan Himmat Khan and the Last of the Mughal Emperors.

5. Orphans of the Uprising: 1857 and its Echoes in Indian Music History

Details of lectures are posted on the news board.