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.
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 postgraduate diploma in advanced performance.
[3] 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,[4] before returning to Cambridge in 2005 where she completed a PhD at Clare Hall on the World War I poet and composer Ivor Gurney.
[6][7] In 2016 she became a member of the English faculty at Oxford University, where she is the associate director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing and Weinrebe Fellow at Wolfson College (founded by Hermione Lee in 2011), and holds a research fellowship in Life-Writing.