Dr Katherine Butler
Dr Katherine Butler
Non-Stipendiary Research Fellow in Music
Email: Dr Katherine Butler
Teaching Interests
My teaching interests are in music history pre-1750 and particularly the Renaissance and early Baroque periods.
Research Interests
My research interests lie in 16th and 17th-century English music. My previous research explored the political uses of music at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, considering the role of music in constructing royal and courtly identities and in influencing the Queen’s policies and patronage.
My current project, funded by the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme, investigates the changing cultural significance of music in early modern England by examining musical myths and stories. I explore the interaction between learned and popular ideas of music and how these ideas were created and altered through the retelling of established myths or the invention of new fictional stories. Focussing on the period 1500-1700, the study will relate these changing ideas of music to the social, intellectual, and artistic upheavals identified as crucial to the birth of modernity, as well as the transition musicologists perceive between the so-called Renaissance and Baroque.
Other Information
I took my undergraduate and masters at the University of Oxford, before moving to Royal Holloway, University of London for my PhD. I have also been an Associate Lecturer with the Open University in the South and a research assistant for the Early Music Online project run by the British Library and Royal Holloway.
