Gates, Henry Louis Jr.
1950-present · Contribution: 1991-present
Built Harvard's Hutchins Center into the leading institution for African and African American research, recovered and authenticated lost early Black literary works including the first known novel by an African American author, and has brought African American history to tens of millions of viewers as writer and host of PBS documentary series including Finding Your Roots, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, and The Black Church
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
As a MacArthur Fellow in the 1980s, Gates identified and authenticated Our Nig, an 1859 novel by Harriet E. Wilson believed to be the first published novel by an African American author, and later acquired and authenticated the manuscript of Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative, work that established him as what colleagues called a “literary archaeologist” recovering thousands of lost Black literary texts. Named Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991 and later the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, he built the university's Department of Afro-American Studies into a full doctoral program and has directed its Hutchins Center for African and African American Research since arriving on campus, while co-editing the twelve-volume African American National Biography with historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, also profiled in this collection. Since 2012, Gates has hosted the Emmy-nominated PBS series Finding Your Roots, using genealogical research and DNA analysis to trace the family histories of hundreds of prominent guests, and his 2013 series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross won both an Emmy and a Peabody Award; he received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal and, in 2018, an honorary degree from his graduate alma mater, the University of Cambridge, alongside his former tutor, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka.
Life & background
Born September 16, 1950, in Keyser, West Virginia, to a paper-mill worker and a domestic worker, Gates graduated valedictorian of his high school class, earned a B.A. in history from Yale University in 1973, and received his Ph.D. in English literature from Clare College, Cambridge, in 1979. He taught at Yale, Cornell, and Duke before joining Harvard's faculty in 1991, where he continues to serve as Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.
Sources
- Encyclopædia Britannica; Harvard Hutchins Center for African & African American Research; PBS
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