Patricia Hill Collins

Professor Collins is a social theorist whose research and scholarship have examined issues of race, gender, social class, sexuality and/or nation. Her first book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, published in 1990, with a revised tenth year anniversary edition published in 2000, won the Jessie Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association (ASA) for significant scholarship in gender, and the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

Her second book, Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, edited with Margaret Andersen, is widely used in undergraduate classrooms in over 200 colleges and universities. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism received ASA’s 2007 Distinguished Publication Award. Her other books include Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice; From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism; Another Kind of Public Education: Race, Schools, the Media and Democratic Possibilities; the Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies; and On Intellectual Activism*.

She has published many articles in professional journals such as the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Qualitative Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, the American Sociological Review, Signs, Sociological Theory, Social Problems, and Black Scholar, as well as in edited volumes.

Professor Collins has taught at several institutions, held editorial positions with professional journals, lectured widely in the United States and abroad, served in many capacities in professional organizations, and has acted as consultant for a number of businesses and community organizations. In 2008, she became the 100th President of the American Sociological Association, the first African American woman elected to this position in the organization’s 104-year history.

Professor Collins also holds an appointment as the Charles Phelps Taft Emeritus Professor of Sociology within the Department of African American Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Professor Collins’s current research interests lie in the following sociology of knowledge projects: 1) the epistemology of intersectionality, specifically, analyzing how race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation and/or age mutually construct one another as systems of power and as theoretical constructs; 2) exploring epistemologies of emancipatory knowledges, for example, critical race theory, nationalism and feminism; and 3) examining how African American male and female youth's experiences with social issues of education, unemployment, popular culture and political activism articulate with global phenomena, specifically, complex social inequalities, global capitalist development, transnationalism, and political activism.