Director

Cate Denial

Bright Institute Director
Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Chair of the Department of History at Knox College

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 2018-2021 Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, Cate is the winner of the American Historical Association’s 2018 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching award, a former member of the Digital Public Library of America‘s Educational Advisory Board, and sits on the editorial board of the Western Historical Quarterly. Cate is currently 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). In summer 2018, Cate was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, PA.