Catherine Gunther Kodat is Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Lawrence University, where she also holds a tenured appointment as Professor of English. She arrived at Lawrence in 2017 after two years as Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. From 2012 to 2015 she was Dean of the Division of Liberal Arts at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she also served as Acting Provost.
A scholar of 20th century U.S. literature and culture, Kodat began her career in higher education as an assistant professor of English at Hamilton College. Over the course of her seventeen years at Hamilton, Kodat was tenured and promoted to the rank of professor. She also served as chair of the Literature and Creative Writing Department and director of the American Studies Program.
Having begun her undergraduate studies as a piano performance major at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, Kodat received her BA in English at the University of Baltimore. Before returning to graduate school she worked as a metro desk reporter for The Baltimore Sun, where she covered crime, neighborhood development, and local politics, and also served as the paper’s chief dance critic.
Her scholarly essays on modern literature, film, music, and dance have appeared in publications such as American Literary History, Representations, and American Quarterly, and in several edited collections. Her book Don’t Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2015.
