Prof Katherine Schofield 🇬🇧🇦🇺🇪🇺
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katherineschof8.bsky.social
Prof Katherine Schofield 🇬🇧🇦🇺🇪🇺
@katherineschof8.bsky.social
21K followers 5.8K following 7K posts
Historian: Mughal & colonial India and Hindustani music, FRAS FRHistS. Head of Music @ KCL. Musicians at risk 🇦🇫 Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly (work in progress). Whippet owner. Immigrant. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/katherine-butler-schofield
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katherineschof8.bsky.social
Me: Hang on, I am trying to read my student's PhD thesis!

Whippet: Don't care that's my chair also I'm cold
November 16, 2025 at 4:06 PM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
Exodus 20:4 “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:”
November 14, 2025 at 11:12 PM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
This morning at the Remembrance Sunday service at our parish church, I read Wilfred Owen's Dulce Et Decorum Est.

It is an excoriatingly angry poem and I delivered it as such.

If what war does to human beings, especially the young, does not make you incandescently angry there is something wrong.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
November 9, 2025 at 2:41 PM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
I am beyond thrilled that my @universitypress.cambridge.org book, Music & Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, has won the 2025 Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society for the best book written by "a scholar past the early stages of their career" 🙏♥️ #AMSMT25
Image: A painting by a late Mughal master of a seated singer playing a dholak drum and dressed in an exquisite kurta and Kashmir shawl, illustrating the entry for "qawwal" (Sufi shrine singer) in the copy of James Skinner's Persian-language Tashrih al-Aqwam (Delhi, 1825) now in the British Library (Add. 27,255). Text: Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858. Katherine Butler Schofield. Cambridge University Press, 2024. Based on a vast, virtually unstudied archive of Indian writings alongside visual sources, this 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.
November 9, 2025 at 7:30 AM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
Katherine: I cannot work in bed a second longer. You need walkies and I have to get to London.

Whippet: zzzz
black whippet fast asleep with nose snuggled between duvet and knee
November 6, 2025 at 8:08 AM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
@ellabaron.bsky.social ♥️

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
copyright Ella Baron in The Guardian
November 6, 2025 at 7:27 AM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
I love that the two greatest Anglophone cities of the world are both now run by democratic socialist Muslim men of South Asian descent.

Very here for the first Sadiq–Zohran bilateral ♥️

photo: @bylinetimes.bsky.social
Split picture: headshots of Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, (left) and Zohran Mamdani, Mayor-elect of NYC, (right) giving speeches
November 6, 2025 at 6:41 AM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
This is powerful stuff: the reasoning behind Pillay’s commission finding that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

“Children who were meant to be born from these reproductive specimens will never exist. Families will be forever changed and bloodlines may end.”

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...
Screenshot of a clip from the linked article: "Of the thousands of bombs that have fallen – and fall still – on Gaza, there is one to which Navi Pillay returns: a lone shell, fired by the Israel Defense Forces at the Al-Basma fertility clinic in December 2023. A single strike that wiped out 4,000 embryos in a moment. The strike was “intended to prevent births” among Palestinians in Gaza, says Pillay, the former chair of the UN’s Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Territory of Palestine and Israel. “That clinic stands alone in the grounds, separate from the rest of the hospital buildings. They didn’t fire on the hospital – if the excuse is that Hamas is hiding in the hospitals, they didn’t touch the hospital. They came straight to this building and targeted and hit the nitrogen tanks that kept the embryos alive.”
November 4, 2025 at 7:44 AM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
The fabulous detail of fireworks, appropriate to this season of Diwali and Bonfire Night, from Mihr Chand's famous late 18C Lucknow painting Colonel Polier's Nautch.

www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6...
October 20, 2025 at 6:45 PM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
He really is the sweetest companion.

Whippet in a cardigan.
Black whippet in a grey knitted cardigan curled up on a bed, with bookshelves in the background
October 20, 2025 at 3:45 PM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
Happy Diwali to all those celebrating!

This absolutely spectacular early 18C Kishangarh painting, reminiscent of the hand of great Mughal master Bhavanidas, is part of the most extraordinary collection of paintings up for auction next week at Christies.

www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6...
October 20, 2025 at 3:11 PM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
On free speech in UK universities. Despite the sensasionalist framing (there is no "free speech crisis" in UK universities; even the last Tory govt's inquiry found none* though that didn't stop them legislating) — this is very good @prospectmagazine.co.uk

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/fre...
This is weighing on the minds of free speech groups in the UK. “We welcome a serious look at how free speech—which is foundational to academic freedom after all—has been challenged at UK universities,” says Jemimah Steinfeld, CEO of Index on Censorship. “But we also have concerns about the new legal duties and how they’re enforced. Will they be evenly applied or just in line with the politics of the day? Is fining a cash-strapped university a good solution? “At the core of the new legislation is a commendable desire to lessen fear on campus. It’s just that the new rules might simply shift where that fear lies rather than tackling the root cause.”
October 18, 2025 at 9:17 AM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
Some Strand Campus pics to whet your appetite — yes, that really is the view over London from the top floor of Bush House where we will be holding receptions, concerts, and other plenary leisure events!
October 17, 2025 at 8:00 PM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
Just had the loveliest time at Frieze Masters — two highlights from Francesca Galloway and Prahlad Bubbar collections, plus a serendipitous meeting!
October 16, 2025 at 6:24 PM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
I'm not a keen follower of the Epstein case. Maybe this is something everyone knows.

But I'm shocked and revolted by the male academics who one after another raped trafficked children. My god I hope you are all found and punished.

Solidarity with the survivors.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
Snippet from the linked Guardian article beginning "The second person I was lent out to was a psychology professor"
October 16, 2025 at 7:08 AM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
I have needed to get up and go and do something for 45 minutes now, and I absolutely cannot. Whippet pillow is my most important job.
October 15, 2025 at 3:49 PM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
<crying>
October 15, 2025 at 3:39 PM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
This is GREAT (thanks for the excellent find @ncdominie.bsky.social )
October 15, 2025 at 3:35 PM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
They make a desolation and call it peace. #Gaza

wonderingminstrels.blogspot.com/2002/12/fare...

www.amnestyusa.org/press-releas...
Satellite imagery and verification of video footage reveals how Israeli forces completely razed what remained of the town of Khuza’a in the southern occupied Gaza Strip over the course of two weeks in May 2025.
October 15, 2025 at 2:44 PM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
Current view
October 14, 2025 at 7:32 AM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
My extremely beautiful and very silly whippet turns 3 today.
October 14, 2025 at 7:27 AM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
There’s something about this incredibly lazy swan by the Cam that reminds me of my dog.

This photo was taken one foot away, and s/he was totally unbothered
white swan curled up on black pavement black whippet curled up on white sofa
October 13, 2025 at 1:14 PM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
still life with whippet
October 11, 2025 at 5:26 PM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
A perennial favourite.

I reckon the bookshop was Galloway & Porter on Sidney Street in Cambridge. Showing my age there.
Poem by Clive James, published in te FT Weekend Magazine: The book of my enemy has been remaindered And I am pleased. In vast quantities it has been remaindered. Like a van-load of counterfeit that had been seized And sits in piles in a police warehouse, My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
October 11, 2025 at 4:17 PM
katherineschof8.bsky.social
Oh Wallace! 😢 His dog buddy Wallace sends special sleepy hugs.
October 11, 2025 at 1:42 PM