We are thrilled to announce that BFE member Professor Katherine Butler Schofield is the 2025 recipient of the American Musicological Society’s prestigious Otto Kinkeldey Award for her book Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858 (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

Professor Schofield’s book presents the first history of music and musicians in late Mughal India c.1748–1858 and takes the lives of nine musicians as entry points into six prominent types of writing on music in Persian, Brajbhasha, Urdu and English, moving from Delhi to Lucknow, Hyderabad, Jaipur and among the British. It shows how a key Mughal cultural field responded to the political, economic and social upheaval of the transition to British rule, while addressing a central philosophical question: can we ever recapture the ephemeral experience of music once the performance is over? These rich, diverse sources shine new light on the wider historical processes of this pivotal transitional period, and provide a new history of music, musicians and their audiences during the precise period in which North Indian classical music coalesced in its modern form. 

The American Musicological Society has shared the following citation for Professor Schofield’s award-winning work: 

"Based on exhaustive archival research and demonstrating the author’s astonishing linguistic and historical expertise, the book tells the little-known stories of nine Hindustani musicians in the fraught years of late Mughal India. Staged between a waning musical culture of classical court music and the dislocations of an encroaching British rule only slowly coming into view, a series of poignant stories unfold telling of court intrigues, musical rivalries, and colonial usurpation. But there are also heartening stories of heroic efforts by Hindustani musicians to remember, record, and memorialize the history of their musical legacy, to codify and theorize their musical practice reconceived for a new era." 

Katherine Butler Schofield is Professor of South Asian Music and History and Head of the Department of Music at King’s College London. A Fellow of the Royal Asiatic and Royal Historical Societies, and a recipient of major grants from the European Research Council and the British Academy, Professor Schofield draws on Persian, Hindi, English and visual sources to tell stories about musical lives in early modern and colonial India. Her latest book, Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858, was described as a “masterpiece” by William Dalrymple, is winner of the 2025 Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society, and was one of three finalists for the 2025 Association of American Publishers Prose Award (Music Category).