Commemorating Muharram in colonial India

Richard Williams joined SOAS in 2017, following a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Oxford (2015-17). Having originally studied Theology and then Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford, his research brings music and sound studies into conversation with the study of religion and Indian cultural history. He received his PhD from the Music Department at King’s College London, with a doctoral thesis on the impact of colonialism on Hindustani music in the nineteenth century. He is currently finalizing his first monograph, on the circulation of musicians, genres, and musicologists between upper India and Bengal between c.1750-1900. In connection to this project, he has written on Bengali-language musicology, the performance repertoires of courtesans, and sound arts in Shi’ah Islam. His wider work has explored musical culture in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century South Asia, the history of emotions, and the place of music in the theology and contemporary religious practices of a Hindu sect, the Radhavallabh Sampraday. His research languages are Hindi, Brajbhasha, Bengali, Urdu, and Maithili.