The University of Washington Department of Sociology is saddened to announce the recent death of highly esteemed colleague Stewart E. Tolnay, the S. Frank Miyamoto Emeritus Professor of Sociology, and chair of the department from 2003 to 2008.
Stew Tolnay was recognized as one of the preeminent experts in historical demography and made substantial contributions to the study of racial stratification, family change, residential segregation, and migration. He published nearly a hundred articles and chapters during his career, almost all in the top journals in sociology and demography. In addition, he authored or edited several award-winning books. His book, A Festival of Violence, was a ground-breaking work, making painstaking use of historical sources and innovative analytical techniques to shed new light on the social dynamics of lynching in the post-bellum South. By showing the connections between lynchings and local population and economic dynamics, Stew and his coauthor, E.M. (Woody) Beck, dispelled the notion that lynchings were simply impassioned and unpredictable interpersonal events, revealing them as an important tool for racialized labor control, employed especially in seasons of high demand for labor and slim profit margins. Moreover, Stew and Woody made a compelling case for the idea that the effects of lynching extended will beyond the immediate location of the violence, shaping interracial dynamics and subsequent lynchings in surrounding counties as well. Most impressive is the fact that Stew and his colleagues were able to harness spatial analysis techniques – just emerging at the time – to make this theoretically compelling case, demonstrating not only the utility of a new set of tools but highlighting the importance of connecting new methodologies to important substantive issues and longstanding theoretical debates. In his follow-up work, The Bottom Rung, Stew made equally impressive contributions to our collective knowledge of the demographic and economic plight of Black southern farm families during the time of the Great Migration, and his subsequent work challenged conventional wisdom by documenting the relative success of southern Black participants in the Great Migration to northern and western cities. Stew’s work represents the best kind of social demography, connecting population processes to broader social, economic, and political dynamics, and both spatial and historical contingencies.
While Stew was a hugely successful researcher, he was perhaps an even better teacher and mentor at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. He was frugal in his personal dealings (he was known to eat the same homemade lunch every day) but incredibly generous with his students. He provided his students with a strong grounding in the scholarly traditions of his field but continually connected these classical approaches to contemporary issues and constantly refined his courses to take advantage of new technologies and teaching strategies, exposing his students to the latest research, and developing more effective methods for fostering crucial writing and critical thinking skills. And he always delivered this top-notch teaching with a dose of his trademark dry wit.
Stew’s commitment to undergraduate education was also evidenced outside of the classroom by his involvement of undergraduates in scholarly research including a project that recorded the roughly 1,000 confirmed lynch victims in the historical census enumerators’ manuscripts, which was completed in collaboration with more than a dozen talented undergraduates, many of whom have gone on to graduate from the nation’s top graduate programs. Stew incorporated the undergraduate researchers as real partners in this effort, including them as co-authors and encouraging these members of the digital generation to use their online savvy to improve project systems and protocols. In 2008, Stew received formal recognition for his commitment to undergraduate training, winning the university’s Honors Excellence in Teaching Award.
In 2011, Stew also earned the Department of Sociology’s Excellence in Graduate Training Award, highlighting a long and distinguished record of developing and mentoring the next generation of population scientists. During his career, Stew mentored more than one hundred graduate students and postdocs, many of whom have gone on to distinguished careers at top teaching, research, and policy institutions. Stew set a high bar for his students, demanding a high level of theoretical and analytic rigor, but he was also appreciated for his pragmatism; he had a unique talent for helping students convert amorphous, sometimes grandiose ideas into analyses that have made real contributions to the field. His generosity, clear thinking, proficiency in imagining effective analytic strategies for complex theoretical arguments, and ability to coax effective prose from even the most plodding writers made him a popular and highly valued committee member. The appreciation felt by Stew’s students is well represented in this lovely statement from Maria Vignau Loria.
Stew’s commitment to his students was shaped by his own educational and professional journey. After starting out at Everett Community College, Stew earned his BA in Sociology in 1973, his MA in 1975, and his Ph.D. in 1981, all at the University of Washington. Along the way he also completed a fellowship with the East-West Population Institute and a Fredericksen Overseas Population Internship (through University of North Carolina) that took him and his new wife, Patty Glynn, to Iran in the late 1970’s. Stew’s first job after completing his PhD was in the Sociology Department at the University of Georgia where he earned tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in 1986. Two years later, he took a similar position at the University at Albany where he helped to fuel the most productive period in the department’s history. During his time at Albany, Stew assembled a very diverse group of demographers and quasi-demographers with little history of collaboration to successfully compete for a NICHD population center grant and led the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis during its most formative decade. In 2000, Stew accepted an opportunity to return to Seattle and his alma mater. He served as the chair of the Sociology Department at UW from 2003 to 2008 and filled important leadership role in the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE). Stew was elected to the Sociological Research Association in 2002 and to the Washington State Academy of Sciences in 2011.
One quality that set Stew apart from others with similar levels of success in teaching and research was his unyielding commitment to service. Stew served at all the institutions he was a part of, and the profession in general--in countless, indispensable ways. He served on and chaired multiple review panels for the National Institutes of Health, including the Population Research Infrastructure Program Review Panel and Special Emphasis Panel for the Demographic and Behavioral Sciences Branch of NICHD. He also served on the editorial boards for several top journals, including the American Sociological Review, and was the Editor in Chief of Demography, the flagship journal of the Population Association of America. Perhaps more important was the fact that Stew was a steady influence in every department in which he worked; he was rarely the loudest voice in the room but was regularly the voice most heeded. Despite his tendency to supplant lesser athletes from prime positions on departmental softball teams (Phil Morgan was a star postdoc-shortstop at UNC before arriving at Georgia where competition from Stew forced him to lower-profile second base), Stew’s colleagues have and will continue to give him virtually undisputed praise for his generous spirit, thoughtfulness, wit, and calm demeanor.
Stewart Tolnay was, and will be remembered as, a genuinely nice person who made the field of sociology his life work and inspired many others to do the same. Stew is survived by his beloved wife, Patty Glynn.
His commitment to undergraduate research will continue with the Crutchfield-Tolnay Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research which is given annually to an undergraduate who has made strong contributions to either independent or collaborative research in the Department of Sociology. Donations can be made to Friends of Sociology in Stewart Tolnay's name.