Richard David Williams is Senior Lecturer in Music and South Asian Studies at SOAS University of London. A cultural historian of music in South Asia, he is particularly interested in understanding how music and sound are explored in literature, and how colonialism reoriented early modern musical ideas and practices. His first book, The Scattered Court: Hindustani Music in Colonial Bengal, was published in 2023. This work explores the circulation of musicians, genres, and musicologists between north India and Bengal between c.1750–1900, and examines how musical societies negotiated the changing politics of a colonial landscape. Williams is currently writing up his second book, a cultural history of Ragamala, the early-modern art of imagining musical sound through poetry and painting. He is also working with Professor Makoto Kitada (Osaka University) on the preparation of a complete English translation of the Gulshan-e-‘Ishq, a seventeenth-century Sufi Romance in Dakani Urdu, composed by Nusrati, the poet laureate of Bijapur. Alongside the translation, Williams and Kitada are preparing a number of studies, in English and Japanese, on the cultural worlds of the Deccan Sultanates. Williams’ wider work has explored musical culture in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century South Asia; the history of emotions; music in Hindu theology and ritual; and Pakistani digital media and literature. His research languages are Hindi, Brajbhasha, Bengali, and Urdu.