Cate Denial

Cate Denial is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History, Chair of the History department, and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. A Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, Cate is the winner of the American Historical Association’s 2018 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching award, and a former member of the Digital Public Library of America‘s Educational Advisory Board.  Cate currently sits on the board of Commonplace: A Journal of Early American Life.  Cate is at work on a new book, A Pedagogy of Kindness, under contract with West Virginia University Press.  Her historical research has examined the early nineteenth-century experience of pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing in Upper Midwestern Ojibwe and missionary cultures, research that grew from Cate’s previous book, Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives, and the American State in Dakota and Ojibwe Country (2013). Cate is the PI on a $150,000 Mellon-funded project called "Pedagogies, Communities, and Practices of Care in the Academy After COVID-19," which brings together 38 faculty and staff from different institutional types to think about, and taken action on, care work in higher ed.