Patricia Hill Collins

Patricia Hill Collins is an American sociologist and distinguished university professor emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park, specializing in race, class, and gender studies. She is best known for her groundbreaking work 'Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment' (1990) and for developing intersectionality as a critical framework for analyzing interconnected systems of power and inequality. In 2008, she became the first African American woman to serve as president of the American Sociological Association.