Minnesota State Mankato Names William Coghill-Behrends Dean of Global Education
Mankato, Minn. – Minnesota State University, Mankato Provost and Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs David Hood announced that William Coghill-Behrends (pictured) has been named the University’s dean of global education after a national search. He began serving in his new role May 22.
Coghill-Behrends joins Minnesota State Mankato after serving since 2014 as the director, Global Education Initiatives at the Linda R. Baker Teacher Leader Center at the University of Iowa. In 2023, Coghill-Behrends was appointed as the University of Iowa’s associate departmental executive officer, Teaching and Learning.
Coghill-Behrends also held faculty positions at the University of Iowa as program coordinator, Multilingual Education since 2022; clinical associate professor, Multilingual Education since 2019; and program coordinator, M.A. Teaching, Leadership, and Cultural Competency since 2016.
“Dr. Coghill-Behrends’ work has been situated largely in teacher education, with an emphasis in multilingual education,” said Hood. “His work coordinating global education work in the College of Education has included the development of both outbound and inbound programs, international grant work, and deep collaborations with local, regional and national organizations that support global education broadly understood.”
In his recent position as associate department executive officer in teaching and learning at the University of Iowa, Coghill-Behrends was responsible for supporting the onboarding and mentoring of new faculty members in the College of Education.
Coghill-Behrends co-chaired the antiracism collaborative in the College of Education and has written about the organizational change process as it relates to building anti-oppressive communities.
Prior to his work in global education in the college, he directed a professional development program focused on building relevant skills for future teachers around culturally relevant, digitally enhanced and data-driven decision-making in K-12 classrooms.
Before starting at the University of Iowa, Coghill-Behrends was a high school world language teacher, having taught world languages both in the United States and abroad.
Coghill-Behrends earned a doctorate in multilingual education from the University of Iowa, where he also earned a master’s degree in German. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Northern Iowa with a double major in German and Russian.
Coghill-Behrends succeeded Anne Dahlman as the University’s dean of global education. Dahlman served as Minnesota State Mankato’s interim dean of global education and interim associate provost until beginning an appointment as provost and vice president of academic affairs at Northern Michigan University on April 1.
Minnesota State Mankato, a comprehensive university with 14,635 students, is part of the Minnesota State system, which includes 26 colleges and seven universities.
