Last Tuesday, Patricia Hill Collins '69, Ph.D. '84, the distinguished university professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, was awarded the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize. She was the first Brandeis alumna to win the award, which was created to "recognize outstanding and lasting scholarly contributions to racial, ethnic, and/or religious relations," according to the award's website. As a part of the reception, Collins delivered a lecture titled "With My Mind Set on Freedom: Black Feminism, Intersectionality, and Social Justice" to a standing-room-only audience in the Rapaporte Treasure Hall in the Goldfarb Library.

Collins received her undergraduate and doctorate degrees in Sociology from Brandeis, and a master's degree from Harvard University. She served as the 100th president of the American Sociological Association and was the first African-American woman in that position, according to a Sept. 9 BrandeisNOW article. She is widely known for her 1990 book Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, which won the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

Provost Steve Goldstein '78 opened the lecture by referring to Collins' arrival as a "homecoming" and expressed his belief that the "spirit of Brandeis University is embodied by the Gittler Prize." Goldstein introduced Prof. Emeritus George Ross (SOC), Collins' adviser during her graduate studies at Brandeis, who explained that Brandeis strives to nurture people who will "become like Pat Collins" and lauded the scholarly work that Collins produced as a graduate student.

Ross introduced Collins, who said that she was "shocked when she received the letter" informing her that she had won the Gittler Prize, mentioning that she thought it was a solicitation for a donation and almost threw it out. To begin her lecture, Collins played a video of "Ella's Song," performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock, which she said served as "both inspiration and text for this lecture."

Her lecture was broken into three components: the contemporary contours of social justice work, the ethical core of black feminism and the future possibilities that social justice work holds.

Collins emphasized intersectionality in her lecture, one of her key scholarly contributions to sociology. Specifically with intersectionality in black feminism, Collins explores how systems of oppression come together to create inequality and determine social positions in her research. Her lecture emphasized the applicability of intersectionality to social justice work.

Collins highlighted the tradition of social justice at Brandeis in her lecture and made many references to her Brandeis education: when she lived in North Quad as a first-year student at age 17 and in Usen Castle as a senior. She explained how Brandeis encouraged her to think about concepts such as social justice and inequality and was surprised to learn that the Brandeis Sociology department was "the critical voice within sociology" rather than a mainstream fit in the field. At Brandeis, she said, she learned to "believe in the integrity of my own arguments" and became more engaged with social justice following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Additionally, Collins described the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, her first black female professor, as one of her biggest Brandeis influences, and described her decision to leave Ford Hall with Murray when it was taken over by students in 1969.

Throughout her lecture, Collins made several informal remarks to the audience. "When it comes to learning, I have absolutely no shame. I will make you do it," she said at one point, and she often paused to ask if everyone was following her lecture and comfortable with the material. "Did anybody die?" she asked.

She ended her lecture with a call to action, saying "when it comes to social justice work, I'm not ready to quit, and I hope others aren't quite ready to rest as well."

Prof. Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman (ENG), who is teaching a course this semester titled "AAAS 136: Black Feminist Thought," required her class to attend the lecture and spent the following class session discussing Collins' ideas. Although Abdur-Rahman valued several different components of the lecture, she wrote in an email to the Justice that she "appreciated particularly Dr. Collins's insistence that we understand the liberation struggles of the most vulnerable members of our-of any-society as fundamental to the rhetorics and the goals of social justice."

The Gittler Prize was created with a bequest from the late Joseph B. Gittler, a sociologist at the Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University, in honor of him and his mother, Toby Gittler. The award includes a medal and a $25,000 cash prize.