Patricia Hill Collins b. 1948

Patricia Hill Collins is an American sociologist and Black feminist philosopher, distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland and the first African-American woman to serve as president of the American Sociological Association. Black Feminist Thought articulated the standpoint epistemology of Black women in the United States, in which the matrix of domination of race, class, gender, and sexuality is at once the object of analysis and the social location from which a distinctive critical knowledge becomes available. Her later Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory has provided one of the most systematic philosophical defenses of intersectional analysis as a research paradigm.

Patricia Hill Collins was born in Philadelphia in May 1948, the only child of a maintenance worker and a secretary. She took her bachelor's at Brandeis University in 1969, her master's at Harvard in 1970, and after several years teaching in Boston public schools and at the African-American Studies department of Tufts returned to Brandeis for the doctorate, which she completed in 1984. She taught for fifteen years at the University of Cincinnati, moved in 2005 to the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is Distinguished University Professor of Sociology, and in 2009 became the first African-American woman elected president of the American Sociological Association.

Her books include Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990, revised 2000 and 2009), Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (1998), Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (2004), Another Kind of Public Education (2009), On Intellectual Activism (2012), Intersectionality (2016, with Sirma Bilge), and Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (2019).

Collins gave Black feminist thought its first systematic philosophical statement, theorised the 'matrix of domination' and the standpoint of the 'outsider within', and in her later work made intersectionality — the interlocking of race, class, gender, and sexuality — the framework of a critical social theory in its own right. Her work is now foundational in sociology, gender studies, and African-American philosophy.