Kate Kennedy

Kate Kennedy (born 24 September 1977) is a British biographer, academic and BBC broadcaster, who specialises in the literature and music of the First World War. She is the Associate Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-writing at the University of Oxford.

Born in Bristol, Kennedy attended the specialist music school, Wells Cathedral School, where she studied as a cellist. In 1996 she commenced studying Music and then English at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. Despite a severe arm injury which affected her career as a cellist, in 2000 she was awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Music where she studied for a PgDip in advanced performance. She then completed a master's degree in twentieth century literature at King’s College, London, and freelanced as a baroque cellist in London, helping to found the orchestra Southbank Sinfonia with its founder-conductor Simon Over before returning to Cambridge in 2005 where she completed a PhD at Clare Hall on the First World War poet and composer Ivor Gurney.

Kennedy has lectured in music and English at Girton College, Cambridge, where she received a Katherine Jex-Blake Research Fellowship as well as a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship. In 2016 she became a member of the English Faculty at Oxford University, where she is Associate Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-writing at Wolfson College (founded by Professor Dame Hermione Lee in 2011), and holds a Research Fellowship in Life-Writing.

• Ivor Gurney: Poet, Composer (Ivor Gurney Society Journal Special Issue, 2007)
• The First World War: Literature, Music, Memory (Routledge, 2011)
• The Silent Morning: Culture, Memory and the Armistice 1918 (Manchester UP, 2013), co-editor with Trudi Tate
• Literary Britten (Boydell and Brewer, 2018)
• The Fateful Voyage (play script, 2018), starring Alex Jennings
• Lives of Houses (Princeton University Press, 2020), co-editor with Hermione Lee)
• Dweller in Shadows: A Life of Ivor Gurney (Princeton UP, 2021)