Henry Louis Gates Biography

A noted African American scholar, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Professor Gates is Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field of African American Studies and Africana Studies, and of The Root, an online news magazine dedicated to coverage of African American news, culture, and genealogy.

In 2008, Oxford University Press published the African American National Biography. Co-edited with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, it is an 8-volume set containing more than 4,000 biographical entries on both well known and obscure African Americans.

Gates is the author of many works of literary criticism, cultural criticism, has edited several influential anthologies, is publisher of Transition magazine and has written a documentary for PBS.

Some of his books are: Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self, The Signifying Monkey, Colored People: A Memoir, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, Wonders of the African World, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's first Black poet and her encounters with the founding fathers, Finding Oprah's Roots: Finding Your Own, Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora.

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