Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, is an award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, cultural critic, and institution builder. He is the host of the groundbreaking genealogy and genetics series Finding Your Roots on PBS, in which he strives to “explore the DNA of American culture.”

Gates was raised in Piedmont, West Virginia, an Irish-Italian paper mill town, with a small but close-knit African American community, which deeply influenced his cultural and intellectual perspectives. Gates initially wanted to become a doctor when he began his academic career at Potomac State College. A prudent English professor persuaded him to apply to Yale University, where he earned his bachelor of arts in history, summa cum laude. Upon his graduation from Yale in 1973, Gates received the prestigious Paul Mellon Fellowship, enabling him to continue his studies at Clare College, University of Cambridge. He was mentored by the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, a Nobel laureate in literature, who inspired his interest in African mythology. Gates’s advanced education at Cambridge, from which he earned his Ph.D. in English language and literature in 1979, further enriched his understanding of literary theory and postcolonial studies, setting the stage for his groundbreaking work in African American literary criticism and cultural studies. His doctoral dissertation explored the relation among race, writing, and reason during the Enlightenment. His seminal book, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, published in 1988, is recognized for its pivotal contributions to African American literary theory and criticism.

“Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
‘Fool,’ said my muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write.’”

Sir Philip Sidney, “Astrophil and Stella,” 1591.

After completing his doctorate, Gates held faculty positions at Yale University, Cornell University, and Duke University before moving to Harvard University in 1991, where he was hired as the W. E. B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities, chair of Afro-American Studies, and director of W. E. B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research. He has taught courses on the African-American literary tradition, W. E. B. DuBois and his critics, and the New Negro Renaissance. Gates has hosted an array of documentary films on PBS, including Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, The Black Church, and Gospel. His latest book is The Black Box: Writing the Race (2024). His most recent history series, Great Migrations: A People on the Move, premiered on PBS in 2025.

Gates was an inaugural recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and in 1998, he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. He is a recipient of the Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program—Long Form, as well as the Peabody Award, Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, NAACP Image Award, and received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal. Gates is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts in England, and the recipient of numerous honorary degrees, including a Litt.D. from his alma mater, the University of Cambridge. The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Lecture, established in 2012 and administered by the Department of African American Studies at Yale, is named in his honor.

Gates is married to the Cuban historian Marial Iglesias Utset and resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.