Patricia A. Banks

Patricia A. Banks is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mount Holyoke College. Her research and teaching interests include the sociology of culture and race and ethnicity. She received her Ph.D. and A.M. from Harvard University and B.A. from Spelman College (Valedictorian, Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa). In 2009-2010 Professor Banks will be in residence as a Fellow at the W.E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. She has also been awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty for 2009-2010.

Professor Banks has been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, an Exchange Scholar at Columbia University, and received fellowships or grants from Harvard University, the UNCF/Mellon Program, and the Irene Diamond fund. She has been recognized for teaching excellence by the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, and presented her research at major conferences such as the American Sociological Association Annual Meetings, the Collecting African American Art: Aesthetics, Methods, and Marketplace Conference at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora, and the Arts, Culture and the Public Sphere Conference in Venice, Italy.

Professor Banks’ book “Represent: Art and Identity Among the Black Upper-Middle Class” richly describes how upper-middle class blacks forge black identities for themselves and their children through consuming black art. In a second major project, she is investigating patronage at African American museums.