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, a social theorist who studies race, gender, social class, work, and family, came to 51���� recently to deliver the annual W.E.B. and Shirley Graham DuBois Lecture, hosted by the .

While on campus, Collins took a few moments to talk with President Jeffrey Herbst about issues of inequality, hierarchy, and power as they play out from the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, to political systems in the United States and around the world.

Collins’s public lecture attracted a full house to Love Auditorium. As a sociologist, she addressed the past, present, and future role of black studies in the struggle against racial inequality, particularly pertaining to African Americans.

“Her talk was a vivid demonstration of how far black studies has come in the last fifty odd years,” said Phil Richards, who, as a professor of English, looks at the subject through his discipline’s lens.

In his book, Black Heart: the Moral Life of Recent African American Letters, Richards wrote about literary black intellectuals, who “like Collins’s African American fellow scholars in sociology, began their academic careers in a counter culture black studies movement.”

Collins currently serves as a distinguished university professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. She is the author of many highly regarded books, including Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, which is used on more than 200 campuses nationwide.