Staff profile

Before coming to Durham, I gained my PhD from the University of Cambridge, then was Lecturer at King’s College London. I have been the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize and a Kennedy Scholarship to Harvard. 

Research interests

My research interests lie in literary studies, broadly conceived, particularly French renaissance authors, as well as cognitive approaches to literature. My publications include Cosmos and Image in the Renaissance (2008), on love lyric and scientific poetry; essays on topics including literature, cognition, and apocalypse; and edited volumes or special journal issues, most recently Movement in Renaissance Literature (2018). 

My current book project, Rabelaisian Interactions: Panurge and Social Cognition, takes as its point of departure the fact that Rabelais’s texts consist of friends encountering each other and the world together. I explore how Rabelais invites us to reflect on interactive sense-making, and on the potential, the vulnerabilities, and the ethics of our interactions. The book has things to say about Panurge; about genres and generic hybridity; about textual design; about power, ethics and affect; and about friendship and community. At the same time, I aim to refine or complicate accounts of social cognition from the cognitive sciences (with particular focus on models of interaction) and to offer fresh approaches for cognitive literary studies. 

The book project is related to my involvement in collaborative work exploring cognitive approaches to literature, as Research Lecturer on the project ‘Literature as an Object of Knowledge’, directed by Terence Cave, and through various projects subsequently, including two international workshops on kinesis and mindreading that I co-directed with Tim Chesters. 

Postgraduate Supervision

I have supervised theses on sixteenth-century literature. I welcome enquiries from students who wish to pursue PhDs in this field or others related to my research interests.

• Sixteenth-century French literature, culture, thought, and history
• Cognitive sciences and literature
• Apocalypse and 'poetic prophecy'
• Movement and embodiment in literature
• Specificities of literary 'thinking' in relation to other modes of knowledge

Authored book

• Banks, K. (2008). Cosmos and Image in the Renaissance: French Love Lyric and Natural-Philosophical Poetry. Legenda

Chapter in book

• Banks, K. (2018). ‘Look Again’, ‘Listen, Listen’, ‘Keep Looking’: Emergent Properties and Sensorimotor Imagining in Mary Oliver’s Poetry. In T. Cave, & D. Wilson (Eds.), Reading Beyond the Code: Literature and Relevance Theory (129-148). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198794776.003.0008
• Banks, K. (2018). Metaphor, Lexicography, and Rabelais’s Prologue to Gargantua. In K. Banks, & T. Chesters (Eds.), Movement in Renaissance Literature: Exploring Kinesic Intelligence (81-107). (1). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69200-5_5
• Banks, K. (2017). Le « Long Poëme » apocalyptique comme « livre scientifique » : discours scientifique dans les poèmes de l’Apocalypse au tournant du XVIe siècle. In J. Ducos (Ed.), Les sciences et le livre : formes des écrits scientifiques des débuts de l'imprimé à l'époque moderne (235-248). Éditions Hermann
• Banks, K. (2017). Fiction, Vision, Dream, Revelation: d’Aubigné’s Tragiques and the Ocean episode. In I. MacCarthy, K. Sellevold, & O. Smith (Eds.), Cognitive confusions : dreams, delusions and illusions in early modern culture (125-145). Legenda. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv16km1n8.11
• Banks, K. (2013). Apocalypse and Literature in the Sixteenth Century: The Case of Rabelais and the Frozen Words. In L. Archer, & A. Stuart (Eds.), Visions of apocalypse : representations of the end in French literature and culture (83-98). Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-0353-0370-4
• Banks, K. (2013). Agapè et Éros, amour religieux et amour érotique dans la Délie de Scève. In B. Roger-Vasselin (Ed.), Maurice Scève ou l'emblème de la perfection enchevêtrée : Délie objet de plus haute vertu (1544) (117-129). Presses Universitaires de France
• Banks, K. (2011). Royal Authority and Commonplace Similitudes in French Natural-Philosophical Poetry: Duchesne's Grand Miroir du monde and Du Bartas's Sepmaine. In M. Bruun, & D. Cowling (Eds.), Commonplace culture in Western Europe in the Early Modern Period I : Reformation, counter-reformation and revolt (129-149). Peeters Publishers
• Banks, K. (2009). Les Mondes nouveau-né et vieillissant: La Sepmaine de Du Bartas et la poésie apocalyptique. In C. Winn, & C. Yandell (Eds.), Vieillir à la Renaissance (319-337). Honoré Champion
• Banks, K. (2009). Interpretations of the Body Politic and of Natural Bodies in Late Sixteenth-Century France. In A. Musolff, & J. Zinken (Eds.), Metaphor and discourse (205-218). Palgrave Macmillan
• Banks, K. (2006). Situating the Masculine: Gender, Identity and the Cosmos, in Maurice Scève's Délie, Marsilio Ficino's De Amore and Leone Ebreo's Dialoghi. In P. Ford, & P. White (Eds.), Masculinities in sixteenth-century France : proceedings of the eighth Cambridge French Renaissance Colloquium (61-84). Cambridge French Colloquia

Edited book

• Banks, K., & Chesters, T. (Eds.). (2018). Movement in Renaissance Literature: Exploring Kinesic Intelligence. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69200-5
• Banks, K., & Bossier, P. (Eds.). (2011). Commonplace Culture in Western Europe in the Early Modern Period II: Consolidation of God-Given Power. Peeters Publishers
• Banks, K., & Harris, J. (Eds.). (2004). Exposure: Revealing Bodies, Unveiling Representations. Peter Lang
• Banks, K., & Ford, P. (Eds.). (2004). Self and Other in Sixteenth-Century France: Proceedings of the Seventh Cambridge French Renaissance Colloquium, 7-9 July 2001. Cambridge French Colloquia

Journal Article

• Banks, K. (2012). ‘I speak like John about the Apocalypse’: Rabelais, Prophecy, and Fiction. Literature and Theology, 26(4), 417-438. https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frs050
• Banks, K. (2012). Apocalypse Now and Then: Fictive and Visual Revelations From Anglo-Saxon England to North-American Modernity. Literature and Theology, 26(4), 361-366. https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frs047
• Banks, K. (2011). Prophecy and Literature. Insights, 4,
• Banks, K. (2010). Confessional Identity, Eating, and Reading: Catholic Imitations of Du Bartas’s Sepmaine. Nottingham French Studies, 49(3), 62-78. https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2010-3.007
• Banks, K. (2010). Difference, Cognition, and Causality: Maurice Scève’s Délie and Charles de Bovelles’s Ars Oppositorum. French Studies, 64(2), 139-149. https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knq008
• Banks, K. (2008). Opposites and Identities: Maurice Scève's Délie and Charles de Bovelles's Ars Oppositorum. French Studies, 62(4), 389-403. https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knn070
• Banks, K. (2007). Space and Light: Ficinian Neoplatonism and Jacques Peletier Du Mans's Amour des Amours. Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 69(1), 83-101
• Banks, K. (2003). The Ethics of 'Writing' Enigma: A Reading of Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du Graal and of Lévinas's Totalité et infini. Comparative Literature, 55(2), 95-111. https://doi.org/10.1215/-55-2-95