Dr Katie Bank FHEA

• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
• PhD, Musicology, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2016
• Master of Music, King’s College London, 2012
• Master of Teaching, University of Southern California, 2007
• Bachelor of Arts, Bowdoin College, 2005

Katie is a music historian and research fellow in the Department of History. Katie’s research reflects an interdisciplinary attention to the role of music and music making within English and European intellectual history, particularly music's intersection with natural philosophy, the passions, and concepts of sense perception. She has published articles in journals such as Early Music, Arts Journal, Renaissance Studies, and the Hakluyt Society Journal, as well as her first book, Knowledge Building in Early Modern English Music (Routledge, 2021). She is co-editor of several edited volumes including Byrd Studies in the Twenty-First Century (Clemson, 2023) and is the associate editor of Sonance: A Journal of Early Modern Sound Studies (ACMRS Press). In 2023, Katie created a major public engagement and education outreach initiative, ‘ByrdCentral’, alongside GRAMMY-nominated early music ensemble Stile Antico and Horizon Voices. She has discussed her work as a guest on podcasts and radio, including BBC Radio 4, and has written programme and album notes for ensembles including The Sixteen.

Katie has been awarded grants from the Leverhulme Trust (early career fellowship), the National Endowment for the Humanities/Newberry Library (USA), the AHRC, Arts Council England, the John Templeton Foundation, and the British Academy. Her 2016 doctoral work was supervised by Dr Helen Deeming (Royal Holloway) and Professor Lisa Jardine (University College London). She collaborates regularly with galleries as well as professional and amateur choral ensembles and sings a lot.  

Music and Visual Culture in Early Modern England

My Leverhulme-funded project aims to deepen our understanding of early modern musical experience, emotion, and musical knowledge through music's complex relationship to the visual. So often musicologists have attended to musical art only to the extent that notated compositions and celebrated musicians can be recognised in them, leaving important questions about the representation of music-making and musical experience largely neglected.

My research has shown that the musical-visual culture of early modern England contains abundant insight into how visual/auditory sensing built interior culture, both of the home and the self. I am interested in what the act of making music meant to people and what they felt when they experienced it. The impact of this study will be felt beyond the disciplines of art history and musicology, as it provides fresh clues and theoretical models for accessing and understanding the structures, relationships, and emotions upon which households were built.​

Can Beauty Save The World?: Aesthetic Engagement Among The Spiritual But Not Religious

Part of the John Templeton Foundation project, 'Can Beauty Save the World?​' at Catholic University of America, our UK-based subgrant explores singing as a 'spiritual' practice, both of the past and today. 

In 1665, Samuel Pepys experienced an extraordinary night singing with friends: ‘Here the best company for musique I ever was in, in my life, and wish I could live and die in it’. This cocktail of good music & good company (plus a few pretty faces) was, for Peyps, key to a life well lived.  

His yearning to ‘live and die in it’, described as ‘extasy’, resonates with choral singers today. Song is a universally occurring human practice. Group singing produces a ‘high’ like the one described by Pepys, releasing endorphins, dopamine & serotonin. Like many in his society, Pepys was a regular church goer yet much of his most ‘spiritual’ writing was often reserved for musical, rather than overtly religious experiences. In religious & more secular eras alike, one finds musical-spiritual experience on the periphery of, or central to fundamental questions of human existence, such as the quality & purpose of beauty, being, or community.  

Our study combines qualitative, historical, & practical approaches to better understand non-religious devotion to, & participation in, sacred music-making as a fulfilment of spiritual yearning. ​The UK-team includes Katie Bank (Birmingham) Rebekah Wallace (Birmingham and Blackfriars Oxford), and Stephen Bullivant (St Mary's Twickenham).