Traci Schlesinger, an associate professor of sociology at DePaul, died on Dec. 19. The DePaul community remembers her for her dedication to her work, her passion for social justice and her devotion to her students.

DePaul is making arrangements to host a memorial gathering for DePaul faculty, staff and the broader community. According to DePaul spokesperson Russell Dorn, the gathering will likely be held in May.

Schlesinger was born and raised in Dumont, New Jersey, where few of her friends or family attended college, according to Newsline. After receiving her associate’s degree from Bergen Community College, her bachelor’s degree in sociology from Fordham University and her doctorate in sociology from Princeton University, she joined DePaul’s sociology department in 2004 and received tenure in 2012.

Kristen Ethier was one of Schlesinger’s students. Ethier, who received a master’s in sociology from DePaul in 2013, says she will miss Schlesinger’s “great spirit and fiery personality” and notes her great dedication to her students.

“I think that one of the things that Traci was most proud of in her life and in her work was her deep and abiding commitment to students,” Ethier said. “She was so devoted to her students, particularly to her graduate students.”

Ethier’s partner, Meggan Lee, was one of Schlesinger’s advisees and continued to work with her after graduation because of their shared interest in studying the criminal legal system. It was then, Ethier said, that she developed a personal friendship with Schlesinger.

Allison McCracken, an associate professor of American Studies at DePaul, was one of Schlesinger’s close friends and colleagues. The two met at summer advising in 2007, a space in which DePaul faculty worked as intake advisers for new students.

“She was a singular person, one who always stood out in a room not only because she was beautiful and had electric blue hair, but because she was so fully alive, so fully present,” McCracken said.

Neither of them had a car in Chicago, so they spent a lot of time walking together and taking public transportation.

“Traci was high femme, so she inevitably attracted attention on the street,” McCracken said. “She was an extraordinary, performative dresser, each outfit of hers a creative act, with often vintage styles of dress and heels ornamented and accessorized exactly. No matter the weather, she always put enormous energy into her presentation.”

McCracken recalled how engaged Schlesinger was with everyone she met. Schlesinger came from a working-class background and developed a strong kinship with those she met in her everyday life.

“She made people feel seen and appreciated, whether in a positive, interested, playful way or in a negative and critical one if they were behaving like assholes,” McCracken said.

David Frank, another of Schlesinger’s students, received his master’s in sociology from DePaul in 2010.

Like McCracken, Frank said he admired Schlesinger’s gravitation towards “outsiders.”

“That’s probably what I admired most about her. That she liked outsiders better than insiders,” Frank said. “She liked the weirdos, the freaks, the people that didn’t automatically fit in were people that she automatically cared about a little bit whether she knew them or not.”

Prior to pursuing his master’s degree at DePaul, Frank had struggled with addiction and had been in and out of the criminal justice system. At DePaul, he gravitated toward Schlesinger because of her work in social justice.

“And because when I talked to her, she let me know that not only was it okay that someone with my experiences and someone who has criminal justice involvement could be in academia, because I felt a little bit of imposter syndrome, but she made me believe that my voice was important and necessary and that I should be pursuing this,” Frank said. “Which was super helpful to me, just because I was second guessing myself at that point.”

In his work, Schlesinger introduced Frank to literature from marginalized populations. These pieces helped Frank use his own experiences in his sociology work while Schlesinger helped him gain confidence doing so.

“She gave me confidence. She made me feel like I’m doing the right thing,” Frank said.

Schlesinger also had a passion for books, music and dance.

“I often thought of Traci as a performance artist, in that she had a very particular aesthetic and a performative energy that reflected and enhanced her critical consciousness, and she was a born storyteller with a mountain of material to share,” McCracken said.

McCracken added that she possessed a “critical eye and point of view,” which made her an excellent cultural critic.

“She understood and could express, often in performative ways, the ways their music could inspire and save people who needed to be saved which, of course, is the only real reason media matters at all,” McCracken said.

Though she had “little use for traditional cultural hierarchies of taste,” McCracken notes that she read every novel that won the Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

She was also a lover of a wide range of music. Particularly, she loved the “feminist punk aesthetic” of Bikini Kill, especially its lead, Kathleen Hanna. In addition, she loved heavy metal, industrial music and anti-racist rap and hip-hop.

In film and television, she watched anything that was directed or written by a woman.

“She adored Sandra Oh of ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ to the point of accosting her on the street to tell her so (I explained that this was bad fan behavior, but she paid me no mind),” McCracken said.

Of all art forms, Schlesinger loved dance the most.

“Traci loved the embodied expressivess of dance the most, likely because she was a dancer and the greatest joy of her life, for many years, was rehearsing and performing with a local Chicago dance company,” McCracken added.