Katherine Butler is a music historian with particular interests in the musical culture of England, c.1550-1800. 

Katherine studied at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford and then took her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London. After teaching for the Open University and working on the Early Music Online digitisation project (www.earlymusiconline.org), she returned to Oxford in 2011 to take up a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. She remained in Oxford as a researcher for the AHRC-funded Tudor Partbooks project (http://www.tudorpartbooks.ac.uk/) before moving to the University of Leeds to manage an OfS-funded project across five institutions, focused on improving progression to postgraduate taught study among BAME students and those from areas with low rates of participation in higher education (https://psstoolkit.leeds.ac.uk/).

Katherine joined Northumbria University as a senior lecturer in January 2019. In 2025-26 she held a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship

She is currently an Associate Professor and Outreach and Recruitment Co-Ordinator for Humanities and Social Sciences. She is also an editor for the journal Music & Letters, on the editorial board for Sonance: Journal of Early Modern Studies, and a trustee for the charity North Tyneside Music Opporunities for Young People.

My research focuses on the musical culture of England  c.1550-1800 and encompasses a wide range of themes including court music, civic pageantry, ballads and popular song, social and community music-making, gender, death songs and elegies, music or health and wellbeing, music philosophy, music in mythology and literature, manuscript studies, and early music printing.

My first book explored the political uses of music at the court of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603). I reconstructed the significance of musical performances ranging from grand court pageantry to intimate music-making in the royal household to understand both the importance of music in Elizabeth’s royal image and how performances might be manipulated by courtiers and the nobility for their own ends. An off-shoot of this project also considered how cheaply printed and orally circulated songs for celebrating the Queen’s Accession Day shaped her image among the broader populace, and the extent to which these were official propaganda, opportunistic commercial exploitation, or genuine expressions of affection.

My second major project used myths and stories as windows onto musical thought in early modern England. Particularly fascinating was the how the increasing influence of empirical and experimental philosophy altered the reception of traditional stories about the powers of music, which opened up my interests in music’s place in early modern science and medicine.

Working on the Tudor Partbooks project provided an opportunity to develop skills in the digitisation reconstruction of damaged manuscripts and to pursue my interests in manuscript culture and early music printing. My extensive study of the only complete manuscript source of Protestant service music from the early years of the Elizabeth I’s reign (the ‘Hamond’ partbooks), shed light on liturgical practices and the training of boy choristers in this second phase of the Reformation, as well as music-making in Protestant households.

My current research is revealing the diverse social functions of rounds and catches - simple polyphonic songs like 'London's Burning' or 'Row Your Board' that straddled oral and literate culture - c.1550-1650. I'm fascinated by how such ubquitous recreational singing could be both community-building and anti-social, humorous or playful as well as devotional or spiritual, while spanning class and educational boundaries. I am also experimenting with reviving social catch-singing through Pop Up Community Catch Clubs and programmes fo schools and youth groups.