Collins (née Hill) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1948. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1969 from Brandeis University, and a master’s degree in social sciences education in 1970 from Harvard University. From 1970 until 1976, she taught in the public schools of the Roxbury section of Boston. Then, she was appointed Director of the Africana Center at Tufts University, a post she held from 1976 until 1980. In 1984, she earned her PhD in sociology from Brandeis. Collins is currently Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland College Park.

Collins’s published work has focused on the intersectionality of race, class, and gender. In 1990, she published her landmark study, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (see below). In this book, she looked at the social, psychological, and political issues of the disempowerment of black women in a wide variety ways, including through the lenses of revolutionary Marxist and feminist theory (drawing on the work of Angela Y. Davis), fiction (Alice Walker), and poetry (Audre Lorde). Her delineation of the epistemology of the way an individual’s total social identity is constructed by overlapping (intersecting) partial identities was one of the earliest interventions in the discourse which would become known as “critical race theory.” She has placed particular emphasis on the linguistic dimension of such social constructions, noting that:

Challenging power structures from the inside, working the cracks within the system, however, requires learning to speak multiple languages of power convincingly.^[1]

Other books Collins has written have broached the possibility of reconceptualizing public education (Another Kind of Public Education) and reflected upon the vital role of public intellectuals in articulating the language in which new social and political possibilities become thinkable (On Intellectual Activism).

Collins has published widely, in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Qualitative Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, American Sociological Review, Signs, Sociological Theory, Social Problems, and Black Scholar, among others, as well as in several edited volumes. Her published work has been very widely translated, anthologized, and otherwise reprinted. She is the recipient of numerous grants, awards, board memberships, invitations to give lectures and keynote addresses, and honorary degrees. During the 2008–2009 academic year, Collins served as President of the American Sociological Association.

Publications: 

• Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment(Routledge, 1990; rev. ed., 2000)
• Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology (Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1992; numerous editions)
• Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 1998)
• Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (Routledge, 2004)
• From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism (Temple University Press, 2006)
• Another Kind of Public Education: Race, the Media, Schools, and Democratic Possibilities(Beacon Press, 2009)
• The SAGE Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies (SAGE Publications, 2010)
• On Intellectual Activism(Temple University Press, 2012)
• Intersectionality (Polity Press, 2016)

Source: https://thebestschools.org/features/black-scholars-you-should-know/