Meet the facilitators

We’re thrilled to introduce the team behind the Care in the Academy project. Over the next few days, we’ll offer bios of everyone involved, and some of their thoughts on issues of care and community in higher education. Today, we introduce our grant facilitators.

Cate Denial (she/her/hers, pictured above) is the Principal Investigator for the Mellon-funded project “Pedagogies, Communities, and Practices of Care after COVID-19.” The Bright Distinguished Professor of American History, Cate is also the Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Cate is a former winner of the American Historical Association’s Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching award, a former member of the Digital Public Library of America‘s Educational Advisory Board, and currently sits on the editorial board of Commonplace: A Journal of Early American Life. In 2024, Cate published A Pedagogy of Kindness with the University of Oklahoma University Press. Her historical research, supported by the Newberry Library and the American Philosophical Society, has examined the early nineteenth-century experience of pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing in Upper Midwestern Ojibwe and missionary cultures. This research grew from Cate’s previous book, Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives, and the American State in Dakota and Ojibwe Country (2013).

Elizabeth (Liz) Lehfeldt (she/her/hers), Professor of History at Cleveland State University, co-facilitates the work of this grant with Professor Cate Denial.  Professor Lehfeldt has previously been Department Chair and Dean of the Mandel Honors College. She is a former Vice President of the Teaching Division of the American Historical Association (2016-2019). She was drawn to the work on this project by her desire to create environments and promote strategies that support faculty in doing their best work as teachers and scholars.