Judith Rollins

Roxbury native and Wellesley College professor Judith Rollins was recently elected president of the Association of Black Sociologists (ABS). In 1971, ABS developed out of the Caucus of Black Sociologists of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and is now the largest organization in the United States of either sociologists of African descent or those with a scholarly interest in the African world.

As president-elect, Rollins is responsible for planning the program for the association’s annual meeting, slated to take place July 30-Aug. 2, 2008, at the Colonnade Hotel in Boston. Rollins also chose the conference’s theme — “Challenging Hierarchies: Nation, Class, Race, Sexuality and Gender.”

Rollins, a graduate of Girls’ Latin School, received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Howard University, and later earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University. She is the author of numerous articles on the civil rights movement, the American women’s movement, and the social psychology of domination. Her most recent article — “And the Last Shall Be First: The Master-Slave Dialectic in Hegel, Nietzsche and Fanon” — was published in the summer 2007 edition of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge.

Rollins is also the author of two books: “All is Never Said: The Narrative of Odette Harper Hines,” an oral history of an elderly Louisiana woman, published in 1995; and the acclaimed 1985 study “Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers,” which earned the ASA’s Jessie Bernard Award for its significant contribution to women’s studies.