Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities
Chair of Afro-American Studies
Director of the W.E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research
Harvard University
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), and a National Humanities Medal (1998).

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 University Press, 1988), 1989 winner of the American Book Award; and Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (Oxford University Press, 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 has edited several anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (W.W. Norton, 1996); and The Oxford-Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers (Oxford, 1991).In addition, Professor Gates is a co-editor of Transition magazine.

An influential cultural critic, Professor Gates' publications include a 1994 cover story for Time magazine on the new black Renaissance in art, as well as numerous articles for The New Yorker.

He and Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah are the co-editors of an encyclopedia about the African diaspora. This work, published in January, 1999, by Microsoft as a CD-ROM entitled Encarta Africana and as a single volume print edition forthcoming in November 1999 from Perseus Books as Africana: The Encyclopaedia of Africa and the African-American Experience.