Tressie McMillan Cottom (NHC Fellow, 2025–26)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is a professor and principal investigator with the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a New York Times opinion columnist, and a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Recent accolades include being named the 2023 winner of the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize by Brandeis University for her “critical perspective and analysis to some of the greatest social challenges we face today,” the 2025 Thomas Wolfe Prize, and a 2025–26 National Humanities Center Fellow. Her most recent book, Thick: And Other Essays, was just listed as one the 30 best nonfiction books of the last 30 years by the L.A. Times Festival of Books. Two books are forthcoming with Random House Books.

Selected Publications

• McMillan Cottom, Tressie. “Disaster Capitalism Feeds Where Care Abandons: A Provocation on the Case of US Higher Education after COVID.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 52, no. 1 (2024): 371–6.
• McMillan Cottom, Tressie. “Where Platform Capitalism and Racial Capitalism Meet: The Sociology of Race and Racism in the Digital Society.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 6, no. 4 (2020): 441–9.
• McMillan Cottom, Tressie. Thick: And Other Essays. New York: The New Press, 2019.
• McMillan Cottom, Tressie. Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-profit Colleges in the New Economy. New York: The New Press, 2017.