Rate My Professor Henry Gates Jr.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor in the Department of English and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, where he is on leave for the 2025-2026 academic year. A preeminent literary scholar specializing in African and African-American literature and cultural theory, he earned a B.A. in History summa cum laude from Yale University in 1973 and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English Literature from Clare College, Cambridge University in 1979. Inducted into Phi Beta Kappa during his junior year at Yale, Gates has received numerous honorary degrees, including from Cambridge and the London School of Economics, and holds an Honorary Fellowship at Clare College. His distinguished career includes serving as former chair of the Pulitzer Prize board and memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He serves on boards such as the New York Public Library, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Aspen Institute, Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of America, and Studio Museum in Harlem.

Gates is an Emmy, Peabody, and DuPont Award-winning filmmaker, having produced and hosted documentaries on Black history, including the genealogy series Finding Your Roots (now in its twelfth season on PBS in 2026), Gospel (PBS, 2024), The Black Church (PBS), and the forthcoming Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History (PBS, 2026). His scholarly output is prolific, with recent books such as The Black Box: Writing the Race (2024), The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song (2021), Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019), and edited volumes like The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art (2023-2024). In 2001, he discovered and edited The Bondwoman’s Narrative, the first novel known to be written by a Black woman in antebellum America, donating the manuscript to Yale University. Among his honors are a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1981 (first class recipient), the National Humanities Medal in 1998 as the first African American scholar so awarded, the NAACP Spingarn Medal in 2024, the Barry Prize and Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Arts in 2024, and the Vilcek Prize for Excellence in Literary Scholarship in 2025. Gates's work has profoundly influenced African American studies, literature, and public understanding of Black history through scholarship, media, and institution-building.