Katherine Butler Schofield is Professor of South Asian Music and History and Head of the Department of Music at King’s College London. A historian of music and listening in Mughal India and the paracolonial Indian Ocean, she originally trained as a viola player at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music before embarking on her MMus and PhD in seventeenth-century Indian music history at SOAS, University of London. Katherine came to King’s in 2009 after a research fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a lectureship at Leeds. She is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Historical Society, and has recently been an Affiliated Scholar at the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, and a Visiting Professor at the Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Katherine was formerly known as Katherine Butler Brown.

Working largely with Persian, Urdu, and visual sources for elite and devotional 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 (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 fabled courtesans, legendary musicians, and captivated patrons she writes on sovereignty and selfhood, affection and desire, sympathy and loss, and power, worldly and strange. 

In 2011–15/16 Katherine was Principal Investigator of a €1.18M European Research Council project (MUSTECIO, 263643) 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. In 2018 she was a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow (MD160059), presenting six public lectures and conversations at the British Library. This formed the basis of her 2024 Cambridge University Press monograph Music and musicians in late Mughal India: histories of the ephemeral, 1748–1858, which has been described as a "masterpiece" by William Dalrymple and was one of three finalists in the Music Category of the 2025 American Publishers Association Prose Awards. She is the editor with Francesca Orsini of pioneering open-access volume 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).

Katherine’s new book is accompanied by a set of widely available professional podcasts, “Histories of the Ephemeral: Writing on Music in Late Mughal India”, and she has recently branched out into documentary film as a presenter and producer. Most recently she co-produced the 2023 film Songs of the Sufi (Director Shahrukh Waheed; Executive Producer Kamran Anwar), which has been well received at film festivals around the world and garnered several awards. Katherine is currently learning to sing the traditional Urdu ghazal with renowned Indian singer and writer Vidya Rao.

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 manuscripts, paintings, and musical instruments. As well as presenting guest lectures at academic institutions and conferences all over the world and online, she has been a speaker at the Jaipur Literature Festival, Lahore Literary Festival, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the British Library. International board memberships have included 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); and she has been a consultant to the Asian Music Circuit, Horniman Museum, Manchester Museum, British Museum, Royal Collections Trust, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, among others. 

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 is unavailable to take new PhD students until 2028/29, but she is happy to mentor early career researchers interested in PhD and postdoctoral work, especially from Black and Global Majority backgrounds, in the areas of global music history, Islam, empire and colonialism, Mughal India, and the contemporary musical cultures of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore, the Indian Ocean, and/or their global diasporas.

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. She shares her home with a geneticist husband, a teenage son, and a young whippet called Wallace.