The Office for Teaching and Learning (OTL) hosts speakers who are invited to campus each semester. These events help to bring new and insightful ways of thinking about teaching and learning at Wayne State. The presenters are national scholars whose areas of expertise have a broad influence on higher education and student success. The OTL coordinates a campus-wide keynote address open to all of our faculty members.

Winter 2025

Catherine (Cate) Denial, Ph.D. is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. A distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, Cate won the American Historical Association’s 2018 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award. She serves on the board of Commonplace: A Journal of Early American Life and is a past member of the Educational Advisory Committee of the Digital Public Library of America. From 2001 to 2011 Denial served as the Lead Historian for Bringing History Home, a professional development program for K-12 educators funded by $3m from the U.S. Department of Education. Cate’s new book, A Pedagogy of Kindness, argues that higher education needs to get aggressively and determinedly kind. A Pedagogy of Kindness is about attending to justice, believing people, and believing in people. It’s a transformational discipline.

As creator and director of the Bright Institute at Knox College, Cate oversees a program which supports 13 faculty from liberal arts schools across the United States in their teaching and research for three years, while providing them with $10,500 in research funds and convening an annual summer seminar. She is the PI on a $150,000 grant awarded to Knox College by the Mellon Foundation in July 2022, 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.”Cate is also a pedagogical consultant who works with individuals, departments, and institutions in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Australia.

Previous speakers