Cate Denial is Professor and Chair of the Center for Learning Innovation at the University of Minnesota-Rochester. 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, 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 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. Cate has also recently published essays on masking mental health issues in Of Many Minds: Neurodiversity and Mental Health Among University Faculty and Staff, and the historical context surrounding her mother’s unusual pregnancy in The Nursing Clio Reader: Histories of Sex, Reproduction, and Justice.

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).

Header image: Peter Bailley / Knox College