*Photo Credit: Peabody Awards
Henry Louis Gates
Prominent Scholar; Author; Activist
FEE RANGE: $81,000–$81,000 [FEE NOTE]
TRAVELS FROM: Massachusetts
Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is one of the most prominent and well-known academics in the US today. He has drawn the world's attention to Harvard's Afro-American Studies program since he took over as its chair in 1991. He has, by many scholars' accounts, taken African American studies beyond the ideological bent of the 1970s and 1980s black power movement, and brought it into a scholarly sphere that is equivalent to all other disciplines. Dr. Gates has authored several books including, Wonders of the African World, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, Colored People: A Memoir, The Signifying Monkey, and Figures in Black. The accomplishment that he is most proud of is the publishing of Encarta Africana. Over the course of 25 years he researched, funded and published this two million word, pan-African encyclopedia with the help of his good friend Kwame Appiah. Encarta Africana deals with everything from the history of slave trade as early as the 16th century, to today's popular hip-hop music.
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 the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field of African American Studies and Africana Studies. He is co-editor with K. Anthony Appiah of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. He is most recently the author of Finding Oprah's Roots, Finding Your Own, a meditation on genetics, genealogy, and race, America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans, African American Lives, co-edited with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, edited with Hollis Robbins.
In 2006, Professor Gates wrote and produced the PBS documentary also called African American Lives, the first documentary series to employ genealogy and science to provide an understanding of African American history. In 2007, a follow-up one-hour documentary, Oprah's Roots: An African American Lives Special, aired on PBS, further examining the genealogical and genetic heritage of Oprah Winfrey, who had been featured in the original documentary. Professor Gates also wrote and produced the documentaries Wonders of the African World and America Beyond the Color Line for the BBC and PBS, and authored the companion volumes to both series. Professor Gates is currently at work on a four-hour sequel to African American Lives.
Professor Gates is the author of several works of literary criticism, including Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the Racial Self; and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, winner of the American Book Award in 1989. He authenticated and facilitated the publication, in 1983, of Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, by Harriet Wilson, the first novel published by an African American woman. Two decades later, in 2002, Professor Gates authenticated and published The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, dating from the early 1850s and now considered one of the first novels written by an African American woman. He is the co-author, with Cornel West, of The Future of the Race, and the author of a memoir, Colored People, that traces his childhood experiences in a small West Virginia town in the 1950s and 1960s. Among his other books are The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers; Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Black Man; and Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars . He is completing a book on race and writing in the eighteenth century, entitled Black Letters and the Enlightenment.
Professor Gates has edited several influential anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of African American Literature; and the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers. He is the editor of numerous essay collections, including Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology; Race, Writing, and Difference. In addition, Professor Gates is publisher of Transition magazine, an international review of African, Caribbean, and African American politics. An influential cultural critic, Professor Gates's publications include a 1994 cover story for Time magazine, numerous articles for the New Yorker, and a biweekly guest column in The New York Times.
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 Jay B. Hubbell Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association (2006). He has received 44 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, and the University of Benin, Howard University, University of Vermont, Berea College. In 2006, he was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution, after he traced his lineage back to John Redman, a Free Negro who fought in the Revolutionary War.
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.
Professor Gates is Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field of African American Studies and Africana Studies. He is co-editor with K. Anthony Appiah of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. He is most recently the author of Finding Oprah's Roots, Finding Your Own, a meditation on genetics, genealogy, and race, America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans, African American Lives, co-edited with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, edited with Hollis Robbins.
In 2006, Professor Gates wrote and produced the PBS documentary also called African American Lives, the first documentary series to employ genealogy and science to provide an understanding of African American history. In 2007, a follow-up one-hour documentary, Oprah's Roots: An African American Lives Special, aired on PBS, further examining the genealogical and genetic heritage of Oprah Winfrey, who had been featured in the original documentary. Professor Gates also wrote and produced the documentaries Wonders of the African World and America Beyond the Color Line for the BBC and PBS, and authored the companion volumes to both series. Professor Gates is currently at work on a four-hour sequel to African American Lives.
Professor Gates is the author of several works of literary criticism, including Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the Racial Self; and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, winner of the American Book Award in 1989. He authenticated and facilitated the publication, in 1983, of Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, by Harriet Wilson, the first novel published by an African American woman. Two decades later, in 2002, Professor Gates authenticated and published The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, dating from the early 1850s and now considered one of the first novels written by an African American woman. He is the co-author, with Cornel West, of The Future of the Race, and the author of a memoir, Colored People, that traces his childhood experiences in a small West Virginia town in the 1950s and 1960s. Among his other books are The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers; Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Black Man; and Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars . He is completing a book on race and writing in the eighteenth century, entitled Black Letters and the Enlightenment.
Professor Gates has edited several influential anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of African American Literature; and the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers. He is the editor of numerous essay collections, including Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology; Race, Writing, and Difference. In addition, Professor Gates is publisher of Transition magazine, an international review of African, Caribbean, and African American politics. An influential cultural critic, Professor Gates's publications include a 1994 cover story for Time magazine, numerous articles for the New Yorker, and a biweekly guest column in The New York Times.
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 Jay B. Hubbell Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association (2006). He has received 44 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, and the University of Benin, Howard University, University of Vermont, Berea College. In 2006, he was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution, after he traced his lineage back to John Redman, a Free Negro who fought in the Revolutionary War.
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.
Topics:
- The African American National Biography
As the Editor of the African American National Biography, published by Oxford University Press in 2008, Professor Gates provides eye-opening analysis of the text while illuminating the abiding influence of persons of African descent on the life line of America. - African American Lives: Genealogy, Genetics and Black History
A lively discussion on individual lineage and African American History in which Professor Gates addresses research, DNA analysis, and poignant family stories. - W.E.B. DuBois and The Encyclopedia Africana
In this informational and intellectually stimulating lecture, Professor Gates delves into the history of W.E.B. Du Bois's three failed attempts to edit a black encyclopedia Britannica, and our efforts to bring Du Bois's dream to fruition.
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