http://www.leeds.ac.uk/music/staff/katherine_brown.htm

Dr Katherine Butler Brown
Lecturer & Widening Participation Officer

Email:k.r.brown@leeds.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)113 34 38218

BMus (QCM Griffith); MMus, PhD (SOAS, London); AMusA.

Katherine Brown

Research Interests

* South Asian art and popular musics c.1500-present, especially Hindustani music
* Ethnomusicology
* Cultural history of Mughal India (1526-1858)
* Music and Islam
* Gender and class
* Empire
* Interdisciplinary approaches to music studies

Before coming to Leeds, Katherine held a Research Fellowship at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. A cultural historian and ethnomusicologist, her current work focuses on North Indian music in elite political, social, and cultural life under the Mughals (1526-1858). Her interests include relating music to issues of power, gender, love and sexuality, social class, physical space, and the body; musical stories in Indian narratives; patronage and musicianship; Sufism; the sociology of North Indian musicians and dancers; and developing anthropological and literary approaches to music history. She also has interests in British Asian vernacular musics, particularly female singers, and is beginning a new research project on music, new media and Muslim community identity in the UK and South Asia.

Katherine is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, and was the 2003 recipient of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Charles Seeger Prize. Her prize-winning paper, ‘Did Aurangzeb Ban Music?’, is published in Modern Asian Studies (2007), and her publications appear in edited volumes, the British Journal for Ethnomusicology and Asian Music, among other places. She has been Guest Editor of a special issue of twentieth-century music on “The Social Liminality of Musicians”, and is on the Council of the Society for Ethnomusicology. In 2006 she was the initiator and principal organiser of the first National Graduate Conference for Ethnomusicology in Cambridge.



Teaching

MUSI1020: Music in History and Culture (team taught)
MUSI1120: Study Skills (team taught)
MUSI1225: Understanding Popular Styles (team taught)
MUSI2025: Approaching the Analysis of Popular and World Music (team taught)
MUSI3721/2: Texts and Contexts: The Female Voice in South Asian Music
MUSI2721/2: Texts and Contexts: Indian Classical Music
MUSI3120: Minor Dissertation (team taught)
MUSI3140: Major Dissertation (team taught)
MUSI1812 Planet Pop
MUSI5060: Introduction to Musical Scholarship (team taught)
MUSI5430: Editing and Archival Studies (team taught)
MUSI5530: Issues in Contemporary Musicology (team taught)



Publications

“The social liminality of musicians: case studies from Mughal India and beyond,” twentieth-century music 3/1 (2007). (forthcoming)

“Did Aurangzeb ban music? Questions for the historiography of his reign,” Modern Asian Studies 41/1 (2007), pp. 77-121. (forthcoming)

“The origins and early development of khayal.” In J Bor, F Delvoye, J Harvey and E te Nijenhuis, eds. Essays on the history of North Indian music. New Delhi: Manohar. (forthcoming)

“If music be the food of love: masculinity and eroticism in the Mughal mehfil.” In Francesca Orsini, ed. Love in South Asia: a cultural history.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2006).

“Evidence of Indo-Persian musical synthesis? The tanbur and rudra vina in seventeenth-century Indo-Persian treatises,” Journal of the Indian Musicological Society 36-7 (2006), pp. 89-103.

“Dargah Quli Khan’s strange vision: Mughals, music, and the Muraqqa‘-i Dehli.” Occasional Papers Series. Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge University (2004).

“The that system of seventeenth-century North Indian ragas: a preliminary report on the treatises of Kamilkhani,” Asian Music 35/1 (2003/4), pp. 1-13.

“Reading Indian music: the interpretation of seventeenth-century European travel writing in the (re)construction of Indian music history,” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 9/2 (2000), pp. 1-34.

Reviews of books and recordings in Yearbook for Traditional Music, Asian Music, World of Music, Journal of Asian Studies.


Selected Guest Lectures and Conference Papers



“The social liminality of musicians: case studies from North India.” Department of Music, Princeton University, 2006.

“The libertine and the spectacle: contested masculinities and the bhand tamasha in eighteenth-century Delhi.” Society for Ethnomusicology, 2006.

“Did Aurangzeb ban music? Questions for the historiography of his reign.” Royal Asiatic Society, 2005.

“The Courtesan, a Tragedy: reality and rhetoric in Mughal historical narratives.” Music and Seduction Conference, University of Amsterdam, 2005.

“The Mughal street as spectacle: street performers in the Indo-Persian imagination (c.1680-1740).” British Association for South Asian Studies Conference, 2005.

“When theory makes no earthly sense: astrology, the body, and the North Indian ragas c.1650.” Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, 2004.

“Performing ‘Britishness’? Music and the question of British identity” panel discussant: “On being British: an outside-in perspective.” British Forum for Ethnomusicology Conference, 2004.

“Dargah Quli Khan’s strange vision: performers and patrons in the Muraqqa‘-i Dehli.” Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, 2003.

“Music, masculinity, and the Mughal mehfil.” Center for Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, 2003.

“For want of a horseshoe nail: an ethnomusicological paradigm for writing music history.” Royal Musical Association, 2003.

“History and censorship: did Aurangzeb ban music?” Society for Ethnomusicology, 2002.

“Historical methodologies in ethnomusicology.” Deparment of Music, New York University, 2001.