Randall Collins (born July 29, 1941) is an American sociologist who has been influential in both his teaching and writing. He has taught in many notable universities around the world and his academic works have been translated into various languages. Collins is currently the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology, Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a leading contemporary social theorist whose areas of expertise include the macro-historical sociology of political and economic change; micro-sociology, including face-to-face interaction; and the sociology of intellectuals and social conflict. Collins's publications include The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998), which analyzes the network of philosophers and mathematicians for over two thousand years in both Asian and Western societies. His current research involves macro patterns of violence including contemporary war, as well as solutions to police violence. He is considered to be one of the leading non-Marxist conflict theorists in the United States, and served as the president of the American Sociological Association from 2010 to 2011. Early life and education Collins grew up in various cities and spent a good deal of his early years in Europe, where his father was part of military intelligence during World War II and also served in the United States Department of State. They both lived in Germany immediately following World War II, and later in Moscow. Collins attended a New England prep school. Afterward, he completed a B.A. in psychology at Harvard University, where he was taught by notable sociologist Talcott Parsons. He subsequently earned an M.A. in the discipline from Stanford University (1964) before completing an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley (1969). Although he did not agree with Parsons's socially conservative methodology, he respected the prestige of being a theorist and emulated this in his later years. Collins wanted to study personality and human cognition but was assigned to work in a rat lab as a research assistant; this made him realize he would rather study sociology. During his time at Berkeley, Collins was involved with campus protests, the Free Speech Movement and the anti-war movement. On December 3, 1964, Collins was arrested during a stand-in for the Free Speech Movement along with over 600 of his peers. While at Berkeley, Collins encountered many influential sociologists of his day, including Herbert Blumer, Philip Selznick and Leo Löwenthal. He worked with Joseph Ben-David, an