Therese Banks

Therese Banks is Assistant Professor of French & Francophone Studies at Middlebury College. She holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages & Literatures from Harvard University, with a secondary field in Medieval Studies. Her current book project examines how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French writers like Pierre de Ronsard, Catherine de Clèves, and Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné turned to memories of the medieval Crusades to understand the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598?) that so marked their present. Alongside this project, her interest in early modern representations of violence has led her to investigate the development of vocabularies of race, and particularly whiteness, in sixteenth-century France. She studies how the vocabulary of race explicitly intersected with the gendered and religious language of masculinities and feminities.