January 15, 2009
Henry Louis Gates Jr. to meet with UW law students
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a leading authority on African American history and culture, will meet with UW School of Law students for an informal Q&A session from 3 to 4 p.m. Friday, Jan. 16, at William H. Gates Hall.
The first African-American to be awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, Gates received his M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature from Cambridge and his B.A. from Yale University. Gates attended Yale with UW School of Law Interim Dean Greg Hicks.
Gates is the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African & African American Research. He is also 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 of African American news, culture, and genealogy. An influential cultural critic, Gates has written cover stories for Time magazine, articles for the New Yorker, and guest columns in the New York Times.
Before joining the Harvard faculty, Gates taught at Yale, Cornell, and Duke. His honors and grants include a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, the George Polk Award for Social Commentary, Time magazine’s “25 Most Influential Americans,” a National Humanities Medal, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and 49 honorary degrees.
Gates has been the host and co-producer of African American Lives and African American Lives 2, in which the lineage of notable African Americans, including Oprah Winfrey, is traced using genealogical resources and DNA testing.
