Gates Jr., Henry Louis

Henry Louis Gates Jr., is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University.

With 40 honorary degrees, Gates is a world-renowned scholar and teacher of African and African-American history and culture. He has authored seven books and written numerous essays and reviews on a broad range of African and African-American issues, including slavery, race, feminism, dialect and identity. In 1989 he won the American Book Award for The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. And he recently completed his second major documentary, "America Beyond the Color Line."

He also authored Colored People: A Memoir in 1994, tracing his childhood experiences in a small West Virginia town in the 1950s and 1960s; The Future of the Race (1996), co-authored with Cornel West; and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997). Gates has edited several anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996). He wrote a 1994 cover story for Time magazine on the new black Renaissance in art, and has written numerous articles for the New Yorker.

In 2000, Gates authored, along with Cornel West, the widely acclaimed The African American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Century. That came on the heels of the authoritative and groundbreaking Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, a collaboration with K. Anthony Appiah. It was also published on a CD-ROM as "Encarta Africana" by Microsoft. More recently, Gates authenticated the first novel by a female fugitive slave, The Bondwoman's Narrative.

Gates began his tenure at Harvard in 1991 after serving on the faculties at Duke, Cornell, and Yale. He is a 1973 summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale, and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. (1979) from Clare College, The University of Cambridge. Gates has received dozens of awards and honors, including the National Humanities Award presented by President Bill Clinton in 1998, the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" (1981), and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1999). He has been named one of the "25 Most Influential Americans" by Time magazine in 1997, the year he joined the Pulitzer Board.