Dr Kate Kennedy is a biographer, cellist, and broadcaster. She is one of the foremost critics of twentieth-century music, and lectures in Music and English at Oxford University.
Kate is the Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing and a Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, having previously held Research Fellowships in English and Music at the University of Cambridge. She is also Director of the Centre for the Study of Women Composers, Director of the Museum of Music History, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Her newest book Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound was published in August 2024 with Head of Zeus / Bloomsbury. It is a group biography that weaves together four narratives of cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury, and misfortune. Dweller in Shadows: A Life of Ivor Gurney was published by Princeton University Press in 2021: it was shortlisted for the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize and awarded the American Musicological Society Prize in 2024. The result of many years of research, it is the first comprehensive biography of the poet/composer’s work. She has published widely, including The Silent Morning: Culture and the Armistice, 1918, Literary Britten, and Lives of Houses.
She is a regular broadcaster and academic consultant to both BBC TV and radio, writing and presenting many Radio 3 documentaries, on subjects ranging across music history and biography. In 2017, she was awarded Oxford University’s Vice-Chancellor’s Prize for Excellence in Public Engagement with Research.
Dr Kate Kennedy 