Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of America’s most prominent intellectuals and an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, will give a free public talk, Genealogy, Genetics and African American History, at UNC Asheville at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 19 in the Lipinsky Auditorium.
The author of 17 books and creator of 14 documentary films who has served on the faculty of three Ivy League universities, Gates is a leading scholar and analyst of African American history and culture.
He is executive producer, writer and host of Finding Your Roots, the PBS series which traces the genealogy of Americans from diverse backgrounds. The series is now in its second season and a companion book, also authored by Gates, was released by the University of North Carolina Press last year. His 2013 documentary PBS series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, earned the Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program—Long Form, as well as the Peabody Award and NAACP Image Award.
Gates has served on the Harvard University faculty since 1991; he is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and professor of English. In 2013, he became the founding director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Gates also serves as editor-in-chief of TheRoot.com and oversees the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field.
Gates’ prominence is longstanding; he 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. He was a member of the first class awarded ‘genius grants’ by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in1998, Gates became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal.
Seating for Gates’ lecture will be ticketed general admission, with overflow seating in Humanities Lecture Hall, where the talk will be streamed live. More information about ticket distribution will be posted at cesap.unca.edu.
This event will be live streamed to the Humanities Lecture Hall which will have limited seating for those without tickets. For further details, visit the event web page.