Evening with Gates
There will be a conversation with Henry Louis Gates Jr. at 6 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 25 in the auditorium of the Sterling Law Building, 127 Wall St. The evening will include a screening of “A More Perfect Union (1968–2013),” the final episode of the recent six-part PBS documentary series “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” that he wrote, presented, and produced.
At Yale, Gates was scholar of the house in history and a member of Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale College in 1973 and went on to earn his master’s and doctoral degrees in English at Clare College, University of Cambridge. He is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.
A celebrated writer, critic, teacher, and cultural historian, Gates is the author or editor of over two dozen books. He has received more than 50 honorary degrees, as well as a MacArthur Foundation Award, often referred to as a “genius grant.” A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Gates was a winner in 1998 of the National Humanities Medal and he was selected in 2002 by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver the Jefferson Lecture, known as “the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.”