Dr Katherine Emery

Katherine is one of our College Research Associates, and is based at the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow.

BIOGRAPHY

I am a cultural historian of music, whose research primarily focusses on saints' cults, liturgies, and libraries from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. Medieval music and liturgy sit at the heart of my research, and I am particularly interested in the ways it could be used as a site for history making, whether that be building confessional, institutional, or personal identity. More broadly, I am interested in interdisciplinary approaches to medieval music and liturgy, the history of the book, and the repurposing of medieval music during the Reformations. I completed my BA in History at the University of Exeter in 2014, and my MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies at University College London in 2015. In 2021, I received my PhD in Music from King's College London, with a thesis entitled 'Music, Politics, and Sanctity: The Cult of Thomas Becket, 1170-1580' (supervised by Prof Emma Dillon and Prof David d'Avray). After a short stint as a Research Assistant and a Lecturer in the Department of Music at King's College London, I arrived at Cambridge in 2023 as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. My project is entitled 'Liturgical Libraries: A Musical History of the Reformation' and it focusses on the libraries of Protestant reformers in the sixteenth century, and the medieval musical material found within. I have published articles for the Journal of the British Archaeological Association and British Catholic History (for which I was awarded British Catholic History's Best Article Prize 2022) and have a forthcoming article in Brill's A Companion to Thomas Becket (edited by Cary J. Nederman and Karen Bollermann). I am also working on my first monograph, which is provisionally titled Beyond Martyrdom: The Musical Afterlife of Thomas Becket, 1170-1600.