With great sadness, we share the news that Long-Term Social Sciences Professor Jenny Smith has died after a 3-year battle with cancer.
Throughout her illness, Jenny remained a vital community presence, RCom and ApCom member, and teacher who (in the words of one recent alumnus) brought “students into different discourses and conversations that push us to be more committed to fixing the problems of this world.”
Jenny completed an undergraduate degree in Political Science at the New College of Florida and a PhD at Yale University. She also studied in the UK and in Germany (the latter on a Fulbright fellowship). Jenny’s work focused on political parties in the US and Europe. Her collaborative work highlighting the role of informal but broadly recognized norms in democracies, and the effects of these norms on political outcomes, was recently cited in the New York Times Magazine. Before coming to Deep Springs in the fall of 2014, Jenny held faculty positions at University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
Jenny died peacefully on August 8, 2018, at home in Lexington Kentucky and surrounded by friends and family. Jenny’s tangible, continuing legacy at Deep Springs lives on in the beautiful garden behind MidFac in which she loved to work, as well as in a memorial garden and bench that have been dedicated to her in the expanded orchard.
A fuller memorial notice is forthcoming in our Fall Newsletter.