Katherine Butler Schofield is a historian of music and listening in Mughal India and the colonial Indian Ocean based at King’s College London. Recently she was principal investigator of a €1.18M European Research Council grant, 'Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean' (2011–2016), which examined the history of transitions from pre-colonial to colonial musical fields in India and the Malay world c. 1750–1900, through multilingual, intermedial, and stereophonic research methods.
Working largely with Persian, and latterly Urdu, sources for Hindustani music c. 1570–1860, Katherine’s general research interests lie in the areas of Persianate and South Asian music and visual art; the history of Mughal India (1526–1858); Islam; empire; and the intersecting histories of the emotions, the senses, aesthetics, ethics, and the supernatural. She is the editor, with Francesca Orsini, of Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature, and Performance in North India (Open Book, 2015), and, with Margrit Pernau and Imke Rajamani, Monsoon Feelings: A History of Emotions in the Rain (Niyogi, 2018). In 2018 she holds a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, giving six public presentations at the British Library that will become a monograph, Histories of the Ephemeral: Writing on Music in Late Mughal India, 1748–1858.
Katherine has also published extensively under her previous name, Katherine Butler Brown.