Patricia Hill Collins, a renowned sociologist and author, has won the $1 million 2023 Berggruen Prize for philosophy and culture, a prize jury announced today.

“We are proud to announce that Patricia Hill Collins is the winner of the 2023 edition of the Berggruen Prize for philosophy and culture,” said Antonio Damasio, chair of the Berggruen Prize Jury. “Her studies illuminate the material, social, and cultural conditions behind the mutilation of human possibilities while never failing to recognize the uniqueness of human experience,” he added. “Patricia Hill Collins has given a voice and a face to so many who would otherwise have remained unheard and unseen.”

The $1 million award is given annually to thinkers whose ideas have shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world. The “Black Feminist Thought” author, who penned the book in 1990, was heralded for the effort, which helped kickstart the rise of intersectionality in politics and society.

In this work, Collins explored how Black women’s experiences have been historically marginalized and overlooked by mainstream feminism and how they have developed their unique standpoint, knowledge, and empowerment. The book highlighted the importance of intersectionality, which considers how multiple aspects of identity, such as race, gender, class, and sexuality, intersect and influence a person’s experiences.

Her insights underpinned an idea with relevance far beyond the American experience: that race, class, gender, and other dimensions of identity mutually construct one another to reinforce inequality everywhere. These themes continued in numerous subsequent works, including Fighting Words: Black Women and the Struggle for Justice (1998); Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (2004); and From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism (2006). Furthermore, her 2019 book, “Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory”, is considered a landmark in developing the concept.

In addition to her academic work, Patricia Hill Collins served as the 100th president of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2018–2019, demonstrating her leadership and influence within her field.

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“(Her work) provides a powerful analytical lens through which we can envision the different and intersecting ways in which our material, social, and cultural worlds produce injustice” and has given us “original vocabulary with which to think about social power and contestation,” a statement reads.

Collins will receive the Berggruen Prize for philosophy and culture in the spring or summer of 2024 in Washington, D.C. As the eighth winner, she joins a prestigious group of Berggruen Prize laureates, including Kojin Karatani (2022), Peter Singer (2021), Paul Farmer (2020), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2019), Martha C. Nussbaum (2018), Onora O’Neill (2017), and Charles Taylor (2016).

Collins was born on May 1, 1948, in Philadelphia. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University and has had a distinguished academic, researcher, and author career.

In 1982, she joined the faculty of African American Studies at the University of Cincinnati, where she completed her doctoral work as an assistant professor, receiving her Ph.D. from Brandeis in 1984. After remaining at the University of Cincinnati for 23 years, in 2005, she moved to the University of Maryland, where she is now Distinguished University Professor Emerita.

“Collins’ articulation of a new understanding of oppression and justice, combined with her insistence that ideas are necessarily the catalysts for institutional reform, captures both the spirit and mission of the Berggruen Prize,” Nicolas Berggruen, chairman and founder of the Berggruen Institute, said in a statement. “In today’s time of urgent planetary challenges to equality, her work challenges thinkers to look to the experiences of unseen people for the ideas that will shape tomorrow.”