Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Dr Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Director, The Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies
Alphonse Fletcher University Professor
Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored seventeen books and created fourteen documentary films, including Wonders of the African World, African American Lives, Black in Latin America,and Finding Your Roots, series three of which is currently in production. His six-part PBS documentary series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (2013), which he wrote, executive produced, and hosted, earned the Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program—Long Form, as well as the Peabody Award and NAACP Image Award. Having written for such leading publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Time,Professor Gates now serves as editor-in-chief of TheRoot.com, a daily online magazine, while overseeing the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field. In 2012, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader, a collection on his writings, was published. Professor Gates’s latest book is Finding Your Roots: The Official Companion to the PBS Series, released by the University of North Carolina Press in 2014.    More