Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Alphonse Fletcher University Professor
Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research
Address:
Harvard University
W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Studies
104 Mt. Auburn St., 3R
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: 617.496.5468
Fax: 617.495.9490
Email: hgates@fas.harvard.edu
Courses | Biography | Recent Publications | Curriculum Vitae
Courses:
African and African American Studies 10: Introduction to African American Studies (co-taught with Prof. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham)
African and African American Studies 301: Graduate Seminar
Biography
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
Professor Gates is Editor-in-Chief of TheRoot.com, a daily online magazine focusing on issues of interest to the African American community and written from an African American perspective, and the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field of African American and Africana Studies. He is co-editor, with K. Anthony Appiah, of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. With Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, he is the co-editor of the eight-volume biographical encyclopedia African American National Biography (Oxford, 2008).
His most recent book is In Search of Our Roots (Crown, 2009), which expands on interviews he conducted for his critically acclaimed multi-part PBS documentary series, “African American Lives 1 and 2.” His most recent documentary is "Looking for Lincoln" (PBS, February 2009), and he is the editor of Lincoln on Race and Slavery (Princeton University Press, 2009).
Professor Gates is the author of several books, including The Signifying Monkey:
A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1988), winner of the 1989 American Book Award, Colored People: A Memoir (Knopf, 1994), and Finding Oprah’s Roots, Finding Your Own (Crown, 2007). Professor Gates authenticated and published two landmark African American texts: Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859), by Harriet Wilson, the first novel published by an African American woman; and The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, one of the first novels written by an African American woman. In 2006, he and Hollis Robbins co-edited The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin (W. W. Norton, 2006).
An influential cultural critic, Professor Gates has written for Time magazine, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. He is the editor of several anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (W.W. Norton, 1996). Professor Gates also produced and hosted two previous series for PBS, 1999’s “Wonders of the African World” and 2004’s “America Beyond the Color Line.”
Professor Gates earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge, and his B.A. summa cum laude in History from Yale University, where he was a Scholar of the House, in 1973. He became a member of Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year at Yale. Before joining the faculty of Harvard in 1991, he taught at Yale, Cornell, and Duke. His honors and grants include a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” (1981), the George Polk Award for Social Commentary (1993), Time magazine’s “25 Most Influential Americans” list (1997), a National Humanities Medal (1998), election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1999), the Jefferson Lecture (2002), a Visiting Fellowship at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (2003-2004), and the 2008 Ralph Lowell Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the highest honor awarded for accomplishments in public television (2009). He has received 50 honorary degrees, from institutions including the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, New York University, University of Massachusetts-Boston, Williams College, Emory University, University of Toronto, Morehouse, and the University of Benin.
Professor Gates served as Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard from 1991 to 2006. He serves on the boards of the New York Public Library, the Whitney Museum, Lincoln Center Theater, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Aspen Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.
Recent Publications
Civil Rights : An A-to-Z Reference of the Movement that Changed America, Edited with Kwame Anthony Appiah. (Running Press, 2005)
America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans, (Warner Books, 2004)
In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on the Bondwoman's Narrative, With Hollis Robbins. (Basic Civitas Books, 2004)