Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom

Sociologist and columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom was born in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City on October 9, 1976. McMillan Cottom received her B.A. degree in English and political science from North Carolina Central University in Durham in 2009 and her Ph.D. degree in sociology from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2015.

While completing her Ph.D. degree, McMillan Cottom served as a graduate research assistant at Emory University from 2012 to 2015. In 2013, McMillan Cottom also worked as a columnist for Slate Magazine. McMillan Cottom then became an editorial writer for Medium.com and a contributing writer for The Atlantic in 2015. In 2014, McMillan Cottom served as a Ph.D. research intern at the Microsoft Social Sciences Research Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After graduating from Emory University, McMillan Cottom became an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia in 2015, where she was promoted to associate professor in 2019. In 2020, McMillan Cottom became an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was promoted to professor in 2024 and served as a senior research fellow for the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). McMillan Cottom also served as a faculty affiliate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. McMillan Cottom joined The New York Times as an opinion columnist in 2022. McMillan Cottom has also written for The Washington Post and while making appearances on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. McMillan Cottom published numerous books with the New Press including Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy in 2016 and THICK: And Other Essays in 2019.

McMillan Cottom served as a member of the American Sociology Association, social media co-director for Division J of the American Educational Research Association, vice-president of the Coalition of Graduate Sociologists, co-chair of the Academic Justice Committee of the Sociologists for Women in Society, and as a judge and chair for the Non-Fiction panel of the National Book Foundation.

Throughout her career, McMillan Cottom received numerous awards and honors including the Feminist Activist Scholar Award from Sociologists for Women in Society in 2017, the Outstanding Early Career Faculty Award from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2018, the Brookyln Public Library Literacy Award in Non-Fiction and a National Book Award Shortlist for THICK: And Other Essays in 2019, a Doris Entwisle Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association in 2019, the Public Understanding of Sociology Award from the American Sociological Association in 2020, the Public Sociology Award from Communication, Information Technology, and Media Sociology (CITAMS) in 2023, and the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize from Brandeis University in 2023. In 2020, McMillan Cottom received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Tressie McMillan Cottom was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on April 9, 2023.