Genealogy, Genetics and African American History
Lecture by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Thursday, February 19, 2015.
Program begins at 7 p.m. in UNC Asheville’s Lipinsky Auditorium. Free and open to the public. Overflow seating will be in Humanities Lecture Hall, with live streaming of the lecture to that location.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, as well as director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. His ten-part documentary series, Finding Your Roots, aired on PBS in 2012.
Professor Gates is editor-in-chief of TheRoot.com. He is the author of several works of literary criticism focusing on race and black culture, and he has written for Time, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Root. He has also produced and hosted several documentaries for PBS. Before joining the faculty of Harvard in 1991, he taught at Yale, Cornell and Duke Universities.
Professor Gates has received 51 honorary degrees, as well as a 1981 MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award.” Professor Gates was named one of Time Magazine’s “25 Most Influential Americans” in 1997, and one of Ebony Magazine’s “100 Most Influential Black Americans” in 2005.
