Rate My Professor Randall Collins

Randall Collins is the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor Emeritus of Sociology in the Social Science faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. He received an A.B. from Harvard College in 1963, studying under Talcott Parsons; an M.A. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1964; an M.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965; and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Berkeley in 1969, where he worked with Herbert Blumer, Erving Goffman, and Reinhard Bendix. Collins held faculty appointments at the University of Wisconsin, University of California-San Diego—where he earned his first promotion—the University of Virginia, and University of California-Riverside as a senior professor before joining the University of Pennsylvania. He has occupied numerous visiting positions at elite universities and institutes worldwide and taught at institutions in North America, Europe, and East Asia. As a leader in the discipline, he founded and edited Theory and Society and Sociological Theory, served on editorial boards of major journals, chaired several American Sociological Association (ASA) sections, was president of the Pacific Sociological Association, sat on the ASA Council, and served as ASA President from 2010 to 2011. Collins has been awarded honorary doctorates and elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Collins specializes in developing a general theory of society spanning micro, meso, and macro levels, originating in Conflict Sociology (1975) and expanding through interaction ritual theory. Key publications include The Credential Society (1979); The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998), which won the ASA Distinguished Book Prize and Distinguished Scholarship Award; Macro-History: Essays in Sociology of the Long Run (1999); Interaction Ritual Chains (2004), theorizing everyday rituals that generate emotional energy and group solidarity; and Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory (2008), another ASA Distinguished Book Prize winner, analyzing violent confrontations via ethnographic and visual data. Other works encompass Does Capitalism Have a Future? (2013, co-authored) and ongoing research on time-dynamics of conflict, charismatic leadership, police violence solutions, and creativity in science and literature. In 1980, he predicted the Russian empire's breakdown. One of the most cited sociologists, his translated books have shaped global scholarship, fostering debates and productivity among peers and students. A 2016 symposium at Penn honored his retirement contributions.