Episode 157- Providing Time and Space with Cate Denial

Office Hours with John Gardner

Cate Denial is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. A winner of the American Historical Association’s Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching award, Cate has served as a member of the Educational Advisory Committee of the Digital Public Library of America, as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, and as a Learned Scholar for the National Historic Landmarks division of the National Park Service. Cate currently sits on the board of Commonplace: A Journal of Early American Life. She has held an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fellowship from the American Philosophical Society, and is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society.

Cate is a pedagogical consultant who works with individuals, departments, and institutions in Australia, Canada, Ireland, the U.K. and the U.S. Cate’s new book, A Pedagogy of Kindness, argues that instructors and institutions of higher education must urgently focus on compassion in the classroom; the book is available from the University of Oklahoma Press. Issues of care animate Cate’s work. Between 2022 and 2023, Cate was PI on a $150,000 grant awarded to Knox College by the Mellon Foundation, bringing together thirty-six participants from across higher education in the United States to explore “Pedagogies, Communities, and Practices of Care in the Academy After COVID-19.” In 2024, Cate was also a participant in the NSF-funded “Convening of Care” project, directed by the American Association of Geographers and the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.

Cate’s 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 out of Cate’s previous book, Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives, and the American State in Dakota and Ojibwe Country (2013). She is presently researching the life of Susan Richardson, an African-American woman who escaped from slavery to establish herself in Galesburg, Illinois in the 1840s.

As founder and director of the Bright Institute at Knox College, Cate oversees a program which supports thirteen faculty from liberal arts schools across the United States in their teaching and research for three years. Each fellow attends an annual two-week summer seminar on new scholarship in early American history, and receives $3,500 in research funding per year.