The Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles has announced distinguished sociologist and intersectional feminist Patricia Hill Collins as the winner of the 2023 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture.

Launched in 2016, the $1 million award is given annually to thinkers whose ideas have profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world. Collins, the first Black laureate, was selected for her work and authorship of Black Feminist Thought (1990), which helped kickstart the rise of intersectionality as a force in politics and society. According to the Berggruen Prize Jury, Collins’ 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.”

Born in 1948 in Philadelphia, Collins earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology at Brandeis University, a master of arts in teaching from Harvard University, and a PhD in sociology at Brandeis University. Black Feminist Thought explored the rich but long-ignored intellectual tradition of U.S. Black women and their distinctive analytical perspectives on life, developing a new vocabulary for the structure of society from their unique experiences over centuries of oppression. These insights underpinned the idea that race, class, gender, and other dimensions of identity mutually construct one another to reinforce inequality everywhere. Collins carried these themes forward in numerous subsequent works, unleashing understandings that have reverberated throughout popular culture, politics, academia, and other hierarchies of power in the United States and globally.

“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,” said Berggruen Institute chair and founder Nicolas Berggruen. “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.”

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