Sidonie (Sid) Smith (A.B. 1966, M.A. 1966) and William (Bill) Kinley (M.S. COE 1965, M.S. 1966) at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. 

 

When Sidonie (Sid) Smith's partner, Bill Kinley, began his search for a meaningful way to mark her milestone 80th birthday, he looked to the University of Michigan's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA). Sid Smith, the Lorna G. Goodison Distinguished University Professor Emerita of English and Women's Studies, is both a proud LSA alumna and the former chair of LSA's English and Women's and Gender Studies departments, as well as the former director of the LSA Institute for the Humanities. 

Bill chose to make a gift that honors two impactful points in Sid's journey at Michigan, establishing the Sidonie Smith Undergraduate Study Abroad Support Fund in the Department of English and the Sidonie Smith Award for Doctoral Studies Completion in the Humanities Fund for the joint PhD Program in Women's and Gender Studies and English.

As an undergraduate in 1965, Sid spent a transformational semester studying abroad at Sheffield University in the English Midlands. "I spent four months at the university and four months traveling around Great Britain and Europe, sometimes by hitchhiking," she remembers. "That experience during my junior year changed my life and my worldview. It gives me great pleasure that the Sidonie Smith Undergraduate Study Abroad Fund will support English majors who might otherwise be unable to take advantage of such opportunities."

When Sid returned to Michigan as a faculty member in 1996, she began working with doctoral students in the Women's and Gender Studies and English programs. "Through discussions in class and in my office, they taught me more than I can possibly enumerate. And they have become friends whose professional lives I continue to follow," she says. "It is critical that our doctoral students find the support they need to complete their dissertations, especially when departmental funding comes to an end. The Sidonie Smith Award for Doctoral Studies Completion serves that purpose."

 

Bill is pleased that the endowments reflect the importance of Sid's committed teaching in the Humanities and her ground-breaking research. "Sid's effective chairing of both the Department of English and the Department of Women's and Gender Studies are well recognized, and it was appropriate to honor her commitment to students through scholarships which facilitate their studies in those departments."

Each department "became more international and diverse in their faculty and curriculum, more inclusive of social action as part of the learning landscape, more capable of hosting robust interdisciplinary conversations and engaging with digital technology, and more outward facing in their own self-presentation" under her leadership, according to a faculty memoir prepared for the U-M regents upon her retirement in 2020. At Michigan, Sid also advanced her work on various modes of life writing, which encompassed women's self-representation, trauma and human rights narratives, travel and postcolonial narratives, African American life narratives, graphic memoir, and on-line self-presentation. 

"As a pioneering author of many scholarly books, Sid has had a well-recognized international impact on her field of study," said Bill. "Perhaps students receiving one or other of the scholarships will choose to continue that work."

Sidonie Smith, Lorna G. Goodison Distinguished University Professor Emerita of English and Women's Studies, celebrates her 80th birthday on November 24, 2024. 

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