In Memoriam: Sandra Bartky
It is with great sadness that we note the death of Sandra Bartky, our former colleague. Sandy was one of the founding members of the UIC philosophy department, and a founding member of the GWS program at UIC. She started her career at UIC when it was still a two-year college on Navy Pier, and taught at UIC until her retirement in 2003. She was a firm believer in the power of philosophy to effect justice in the world and the importance of supporting intellectual community: and her work and her writing managed to do both. The essays in her best known work, Femininity and Domination named and analyzed the effects of microaggressions thirty years before the term came into fashion. They are still widely read, taught and cited.
Her legacy in the department lives on in many ways: in our courses (Phil 110 "Philosophy of Love and Sex" and Phil 232 "Gender Roles" were her creations), in our commitment to feminism as a central and uncontroversial way to approach philosophical questions, and in our democratic ethos, among other things.
You can read more about Sandy's work and influence on the New York Times (here), the Feminist Philosophers (here and here), and Ms. Magazine's blog (here).
On Wed. Oct. 26, friends and former students and colleagues gathered to remember and celebrate the life of Sandra Bartky.