Patricia Hill Collins Opens the Spring 2003 Assembly Series at Washington University

Patricia Hill Collins, Charles Phelps Taft Professor of Sociology and Chair of the African American studies department at the University of Cincinnati will deliver the annual Chancellor’s Fellowship Lecture as part of the university’s Assembly Series. Hill’s talk will take place at 11 a.m., Jan. 29th. The lecture is free and open to the public and will be held in Graham Chapel, located just north of Mallinckrodt Center (6445 Forsyth Blvd.) on the Washington University campus.

Collins is the Charles Phelps Taft Professor of Sociology and the department’s chair at the University of Cincinnati. An expert in issues of race, gender and social class relating primarily to African-American women, her fourth book on the subject, Black Sexual Politics, will be published in 2003. Her first book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990), which received both the Jessie Bernard Award from the American Sociological Association and the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, is considered ground-breaking work. This was followed by Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology (1992), co-edited with Margaret Andersen, and Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (1998).

Collins has been widely published in scholarly journals, among them “Ethnic and Racial Studies,” “Signs,” “Sociological Theory;” “Social Problems” and “Black Scholar,” and she serves on the editorial boards of “Ethnicities,” “Feminist Theory” and “Ethnic and Racial Studies.”

Before teaching at the University of Cincinnati, Collins held faculty positions with a number of universities, including Northern Kentucky University, Tufts University and Boston College. Collins received a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. from Brandeis University and a master’s degree from Harvard University.

The annual Chancellor’s Fellowship Conference is part of the Chancellor’s Fellowship Program for African-Americans, established to encourage African-Americans of high academic promise to prepare for careers as college or university professors

For more information, call (314) 935-5297 or visit the Assembly Series web page (http://wupa.wustl.edu/assembly).