Henry Louis Gates Jr., Ph.D., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, will deliver the keynote address for the 12th annual Chancellor’s Fellowship Conference at 2 p.m. April 26 in Graham Chapel at Washington University.
The talk is free and open to the public.
Gates, also director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, will talk on “African Americans and Documentary Film.”
He will be joined by Gerald L. Early, Ph.D., the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters, professor of English, of African & African American studies and of American culture studies and director of the Center for the Humanities, all in Arts & Sciences.
A question-and-answer session will immediately follow the talk, which is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities.
A pioneering scholar of African and African-American literature, Gates is considered one of the nation’s foremost cultural critics and a pre-eminent public intellectual.
Gates graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1973. He won a Mellon Fellowship to study at Clare College at the University of Cambridge in England, where in 1979 he became the first black American to earn a doctorate.
In 1980, as an assistant professor at Yale, he launched the Black Periodical Literature Project, devoted to studying African-American newspapers published in America between 1827-1940.
The following year he received a $150,000 MacArthur Fellowship — or “genius grant” — which culminated in his re-discovery and re-publication, in 1983, of Harriet E. Wilson’s “Our Nig; or, Sketches From the Life of a Free Black” (1859), the first novel published in the United States by an African-American.
Over the next several years, Gates helped to define an African-American literary canon through a series of books, notably “The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism” (1988), winner of the 1989 American Book Award.
Gates has written widely on the contemporary African-American experience, in books such as “Colored People: A Memoir” (1994) and “The Future of the Race” (with Cornel West, 1996), as well as in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man” (1997), a collection of magazine profiles.
In 1997 Gates was voted one of Time magazine’s “25 Most Influential Americans.” Other projects include developing and hosting a series of documentaries for PBS, most recently “African American Lives” (2006), in which he traces the family trees of nine prominent African Americans, including himself. He’s now working on a four-hour sequel to “African American Lives.”
His most recent book, published in January, is “Finding Oprah’s Roots: Finding Your Own.” A corresponding one-hour documentary first aired on PBS in late January and covered the genealogical and genetic heritage of Oprah Winfrey.
In 2006, Gates received an honorary doctor of humane letters from Washington University.
The annual Chancellor’s Fellowship Conference is part of the Chancellor’s Graduate Fellowship Program, which supports training for students who will contribute to diversity in graduate education and who are interested in becoming college or university professors.
For more information on the conference, call 935-6821.