Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "is a W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, is Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies, and is the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Professor Gates is co-editor with K. Anthony Appiah of the encyclopedia Encarta Africana published on CD-ROM by Microsoft (1999), and in book form by Basic Civitas Books under the title Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (1999). He is the author of Wonders of the African World (1999), the book companion to the six-hour BBC/PBS television series of the same name. He is also the author of America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans (2004), written to accompany the PBS documentary with the same title.

"Professor Gates is the author of several works of literary criticism, including Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the 'Racial' Self (Oxford University Press, 1987); The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1988), 1989 winner of the American Book Award; and Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (Oxford, 1992.) He has also authored Colored People: A Memoir (Knopf, 1994), which traces his childhood experiences in a small West Virginia town in the 1950s and 1960s; The Future of the Race (Knopf, 1996), co-authored with Cornel West; and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (Random House, 1997).

"Professor Gates earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge. He received a B.A. summa cum laude from Yale University in 1973 in English Language and Literature. Before joining the faculty of Harvard in 1991, he taught at Yale, Cornell, and Duke Universities. His honors and grants include a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" (1981), the George Polk Award for Social Commentary (1993), Chicago Tribune Heartland Award (1994), the Golden Plate Achievement Award (1995), Time magazine's "25 Most Influential Americans" list (1997), a National Humanities Medal (1998), and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1999)."

Affiliations

 * Trustee, Freedom House
 * Director, Children's Defense Fund
 * Director, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
 * Scholar/Advisor, International Freedom Center
 * Director, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
 * Winner of the 1998 National Endowment for the Humanities: National Humanities Medal
 * Director, Pro Publica
 * Advisory Board, Nieman Foundation

Criticism

 * Ishmael Reed, "Post-Race Scholar Yells Racism: How Henry Louis Gates Got Ordained as the Nation's "Leading Black Intellectual"", Counterpunch, July 27, 2009.
 * Femi Akomolafe, “Professor Henry Gates Got His Comeuppance”, Swans Commentary, August 10, 2009.

Related Sourcewatch

 * Cornel West - coauthor