Katie Bank

Katie Bank is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Birmingham in the Department of History. Her work reflects an interdisciplinary attention to the role of recreational song and visual culture within the intellectual history of early modern England, particularly music's intersection with natural philosophy, the passions, and concepts of sense perception. Publications include a monograph, Knowledge Building in Early Modern English Music (Routledge, 2021) as well as articles in journals such as Early Music, Journal of the Hakluyt Society, Arts Journal, and Renaissance Studies. She is co-editor of Byrd Studies in the Twenty-First Century (Clemson, 2023) and has recently discussed her work as a guest on podcasts and radio, including BBC Radio 4. She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities/Newberry Library, Arts Council England, the Leverhulme Trust, AHRC, and the British Academy. Katie is also an avid choral singer and enjoys frequent collaboration with professional and amateur ensembles alike.

A native of California, Katie spent several years as a full-time music teacher and arts administrator before her life as a musicologist and continues to draw liberally from this foundation in her work in higher education. In addition to Birmingham, she has taught undergraduates and/or postgraduates at the University of Oxford (Magdalen, Lady Margaret Hall, Oriel, Somerville), UCL (MA in Early Modern Exchange), and Royal Holloway, with guest lectures at University of Surrey, Imperial College, and De Paul University.

Supervised by Dr Helen Deeming (RHUL) and Professor Lisa Jardine (UCL), Katie completed her doctoral studies at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2016 and was examined by Regius Professor Julian Johnson and Professor Richard Wistreich. She collaborates regularly with colleagues at the Courtauld Gallery, the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (UCL), and various choral ensembles around London. 

My research reflects an interdisciplinary attention to the role of music and visual culture within the intellectual history of early modern England, particularly music's intersection with natural philosophy, the passions, and concepts of sense perception. Recent publications focus on English song, visual and material culture, and the idea of historical experience, revising of the way vernacular recreational music is perceived and taught.

'Musical-Visual Culture in Early Modern England' marks the first dedicated study of depictions of music making in late-Elizabethan, early-Stuart England. It will not only deepen our understanding of early modern emotion but revise narratives about the role of aesthetic experience in seventeenth century intellectual history. For historiographical reasons, art historians and musicologists have yet to analyse together the large body of song and visual culture that explores shared metaphysical topoi, including sensing, dreaming, and love. Focusing on song and musical imagery, my project contributes to our understanding of how visual and auditory sensing built interiority in the home and the self.