Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
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Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. (born September 16, 1950, Piedmont, West Virginia Mineral County) is an educator, scholar, literary critic, writer, editor of Transition Magazine and the chair of Harvard's African and African American Studies department. Gates earned a BA summa cum laude from Yale University and a Ph.D. in English from Clare College, Cambridge University. After teaching at Yale, he was denied tenure, passed over in favor of the distinguished literary critic Robert Stepto. Gates and his frequent collaborator, Anglo-Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, decamped to Cornell University, then to Duke University before settling at Harvard, where Gates is the W. E. B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities and teaches primarily in the AAAS and English departments. In 1994 Gates received an honorary L.H.D. (Doctor of Humane Letters) from Bates College.
Gates has applied structuralism, post-structuralism and semiotics to textual analysis and matters of identity politics. He hosted America Beyond the Color Line and African American Lives for PBS.
He originated the application of the concept of "signifyin(g)" to African-American literary criticism and history. In 1981, Gates was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.
In 1997 Gates was voted one of Time Magazine's "25 Most Influential Americans."
In recent years Gates has become a strong supporter of Fred Newman and Lenora Fulani's All Stars Project, a controversial youth charity based in New York City. In 2005, Gates joined the board of directors of All Stars. [1]
Books
- The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, winner of the American Book Award
- Black Literature and Literary Theory editor
- Colored People: A Memoir (1994)
- Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self
- Norton Anthology of African American Literature co-edited with Nellie Y. McKay.
- Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man Vintage; Reprint edition (1998) ISBN 0679776664
He has also edited Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave.