Graves Edwards Enck passed away on Thursday, June 2, 2022, after a long, courageous battle with cancer. Enck earned several degrees, including a BA from the University of North Texas, a MDiv from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a PhD from Yale University. He taught in the Department of Sociology at Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis) from 1974 to 2022, and received several awards, including most recently the University Distinguished Advising Award (2002) and the University College Advising Award (2003). To read the complete obituary, click here.
Grant Walter Shoffstall, 44, died on Wednesday, June 8, 2022. A native of Effingham, IL, Shoffstall received his BA and MA in sociology from Illinois State University, and his PhD in sociology from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. One of the world’s experts on the cryonics movement, he taught classes at Illinois Wesleyan, University of Illinois, and Williams College, before joining the sociology department at Rowan University. Shoffstall’s work documented the movements in which technology begins to function as a religion, arguing in his recent work for Nova Religio that sociologists of science and technology were going to have to learn from the sociologists of religion. His full obituary can be read here.
Dorothy E. Smith, the renowned sociological thinker, feminist critic, teacher, and mentor died on Friday, June 3, 2022. Smith was one of the first women to earn a PhD at the University of California-Berkeley, in 1962. She taught at the University of British Columbia; the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto; and after retirement, at the University of Victoria. Her first book was The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Northeastern University Press 1987) and her most recent was Simply Institutional Ethnography: Creating a Sociology for People (University of Toronto Press 2022), coauthored with the late Alison Griffith. Smith received the American Sociological Association’s Jessie Bernard Award in 1993 and its W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award in 1999. Smith was honored with many other accolades from universities and professional organizations throughout the world, and in 2019 she received the Order of Canada for her contributions to society.
