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Trudi Tate

College positions:
Emeritus Fellow, Review Editor
Subject:
English Literature
Department/institution:
Faculty of English, Literature Cambridge
Contact details:
tt206@cam.ac.uk

Dr Trudi Tate

Dr Trudi Tate is an Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall, and an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of English.

She works on English literature from the 1850s to the present day, with a particular interest in how literature attempts to bear witness to events of its time, particularly in times of war. She has published on the literature of the First World War, the Crimean War and the American-Vietnamese War.

Dr Tate has an interest in reading psychoanalysis historically and has worked on Freud, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, D W Winnicott, and John Bowlby. An essay on the Armistice of 1918 explores how babies were perceived in Britain at this time, looking at the influence of Truby King alongside writings by Woolf, Bowen and Mansfield.

Dr Tate published A Short History of the Crimean War, examining the military and naval histories, as well as representations of the war in newspapers, photographs and poetry.

She also works on memoirs and novels by Vietnamese, American and Australian soldiers and refugees of the American/Vietnamese War, and taught an MPhil course on this subject in the Cambridge English Faculty. In addition, she wrote a memoir of an Australian veteran who served in Viet Nam, The Listening Watch (2013).

Dr Tate has supervised on the English tripos for many Cambridge colleges, and lectured in the Faculty of English on British and American literature, with a special interest in Virginia Woolf. She has supervised many undergraduate, MPhil and PhD dissertations, and taught for the Sutton Trust. Her previous posts include lectureships at the universities of Edinburgh and Southampton, and a Visiting Professorship at the Goethe Universität, Frankfurt.

In College, Dr Tate edits the Clare Hall Review. She was a Tutor from 2001-19, Assistant Senior Tutor 2019-21, and Praelector from 2014-19. She ran the family activities for many years, was the administrator of the Intimate Engagements concerts, and set up the Clare Hall Literary Talks series in 2013. This brought leading contemporary writers to Clare Hall, including Ali Smith, Olivia Laing, Christina Koning, and Francis Spufford. In 2015, the focus turned to the writings of Virginia Woolf, attracting large audiences from town and gown. Dr Tate also ran series of literary talks at Lucy Cavendish College, focusing on Virginia Woolf and her contemporaries.

Outside College, Dr Tate was for ten years Aurora Fellow, supporting Indigenous Australian postgraduate students in Oxford and Cambridge. She is Director of Literature Cambridge, which offers summer courses and online study sessions taught by leading scholars, most from Cambridge.

Books

  • Trudi Tate, A Short History of the Crimean War (I. B. Tauris, 2019). ISBN: 9781848858619
  • Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy, eds., The Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice (Manchester University Press, 2013)
  • Trudi Tate, The Listening Watch: Memories of Viet Nam (2013)
  • Kate Kennedy and Trudi Tate, eds., First World War Studies, 2,1, special issue, Literature and Music of the First World War (Spring 2011)
  • Trudi Tate, ed. and introd., Richard Chatterton, VC (1915) by Ruby M. Ayres, vol. 2 of British Literature of World War I, ed. Andrew Maunder and Angela K. Smith (Pickering and Chatto, 2011)
  • Kate Kennedy and Trudi Tate, eds., Ivor Gurney Journal, special issue, Ivor Gurney: Poet, Composer (2007)
  • Helen Small and Trudi Tate, eds., Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer (Oxford University Press, 2003)
  • Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester University Press, 1998; rev. edn HeB, 2013)
  • Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate, eds., Women’s Fiction and the Great War (Oxford University Press, 1997)
  • Trudi Tate, ed., Women, Men and the Great War: An Anthology of Stories (Manchester University Press, 1995)
  • Bronte Adams and Trudi Tate, eds., That Kind of Woman: Stories from the Left Bank and Beyond (Virago, 1991; rpt 1997)
  • Trudi Tate, ed., Journey to Paradise: Stories and Autobiographical Sketches by Dorothy Richardson (Virago, 1989)

Select articles

  • Trudi Tate, Living Afterwards: Thuy Le and Viet NguyenBook 2.0, 8: 1-2 (September 2018)
  • Trudi Tate, Sebastopol: On the Fall of a City,19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 20, special issue on the Crimean War, ed. Rachel Bates, Holly Furneaux and Alistair Massey (2015). Read the beginning here
  • Trudi Tate, King Baby, in Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy, eds., The Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice (Manchester University Press, 2013; 2015). Featured on University of Cambridge research page, November 2015
  • Trudi Tate, The First World War: British Writing, in Kate McLaughlin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to War Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
  • Trudi Tate, On Not Knowing Why: Memorializing the Light Brigade, in Helen Small and Trudi Tate, eds., Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer (Oxford University Press, 2003)
  • Trudi Tate, A Century of Dud Patriots, on Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty, 2nd edn, Quadrant, 44 (October 2000)
  • Trudi Tate, HD’s War Neurotics, in Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate, eds., Women’s Fiction and the Great War (Oxford University Press, 1997)
  • Trudi Tate, Rumour, Propaganda, Parade’s End’, Essays in Criticism, 47, 4 (October 1997)
  • Trudi Tate, The Culture of the TankModernism/Modernity, 4,1 (January 1997)
  • Trudi Tate, Mrs Dalloway and the Armenian QuestionTextual Practice, 8, 3 (1994); rpt in the Norton edition of Mrs Dalloway, ed. Anne Fernald (2021)
  • Trudi Tate, Unravelling the Feminine: Peter Carey’s ‘Peeling’, Meanjin (Australia), 46, 3 (1987)

Further links