McMillan Cottom earned her doctorate from Emory University’s Laney Graduate School in sociology in 2015. Before joining the faculty at Carolina, she was an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is an associate professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS), a senior faculty researcher with the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a faculty affiliate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Tressie McMillan Cottom is an award-winning author, professor, and sociologist, whose work has earned national and international recognition for the urgency and depth of its incisive critical analysis of technology, higher education, class, race, and gender. Her most recent accolades include a 2020 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, informally known as the “genius grant.”
BA (English and Political Science), North Carolina Central Universityĭr.