Lendol Calder
is an associate professor of history and history department
chair at Augustana College, Rock
Island, Ill.
Before coming to Augustana, he taught at Colby-Sawyer College in
New Hampshire, the University of Washington, Seattle, and the
University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1993. A
native of Texas, Calder’s Bachelor of Arts degree is from the
University of Texas at Austin where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa
in 1980. A scholar of the
history of American consumerism, Calder’s 1999 book Financing
the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit
was hailed by the Wall Street Journal as “deliciously
seditious” for the ways it inverted common assumptions about the
meaning of credit in American life. With a team of 27
other distinguished scholars brought together by the Templeton
Foundation and the Institute for the Advanced Study of American
Culture at the University of Virginia, Calder is currently at
work on a multidisciplinary, multivolume analysis of the thrift
ethos in American history and culture.
An
accomplished teacher, Calder also is a
leader in the growing movement to bring scholarly modes of
inquiry to teaching and learning in higher education.
In 1999, Calder was chosen by the Carnegie Foundation to
be a Fellow at the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of
Teaching and Learning. Carnegie Scholars are a select group of
distinguished academicians from diverse fields who are working
together to invent and share new models for the study of
teaching and learning at the post-secondary level. Calder’s
research, published in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of
American History, examines the problem of “coverage” in
introductory courses and is part of a larger effort to forge a
new “signature pedagogy” for the discipline of history.
His work as a Carnegie Scholar has made him a popular speaker
and presenter on topics related to historical thinking and the
teaching of undergraduates. His recent consulting work includes important
national initiatives such as the Teaching American History Grant
Program, the Quality in Undergraduate Education Project, the
National Council for History Education, and the National Film
Preservation Foundation.
Dr. Calder lives in Rock
Island with his wife, Kathy, and two children, Abigail and
Andrew.
