Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored seventeen books and created fourteen documentary films, including "Wonders of the African World", "African American Lives", "Black in Latin America", and "Finding Your Roots", now in its second season on PBS. His six-part PBS documentary series, "The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross" (2013), which he wrote, executive produced, and hosted, earned the Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program—Long Form, as well as the Peabody Award and NAACP Image Award. Having written for such leading publications as "The New Yorker", "The New York Times", and "Time", Professor Gates now serves as editor-in-chief of "TheRoot.com", a daily online magazine, while overseeing the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field. In 2012, "The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader", a collection on his writings, was published. Professor Gates’s latest book is "Finding Your Roots: The Official Companion to the PBS Series", released by the University of North Carolina Press in 2014. The recipient of fifty-three honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor Gates was a member of the first class awarded “genius grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998, he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. He was named to Time’s 25 Most Influential Americans list in 1997, to Ebony’s Power 150 list in 2009, and to Ebony’s Power 100 list in 2010 and 2012. He earned his B.A. in English Language and Literature, summa cum laude, from Yale University in 1973, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge in 1979. Professor Gates has directed the W. E. B. Institute for African and African American Research—now the Hutchins Center—since arriving at Harvard in 1991, and during his first fifteen years on campus, he chaired the Department of Afro-American Studies as it expanded into the Department of African and African American Studies with a full-fledged doctoral program. He also is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and serves on a wide array of boards, including the New York Public Library, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Aspen Institute, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of America, and the Brookings Institution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates Cornel Ronald West (born June 2, 1953) is an American philosopher, academic, activist, author, public intellectual, and prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America. The son of a Baptist minister, West received his undergraduate education at Harvard University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1973, and received a Ph.D at Princeton University in 1980, becoming the first African American to graduate from Princeton with a Ph.D in philosophy.[1] He was formerly The Class of 1943 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton[2][3] before leaving the school in 2011 to become Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at the Union Theological Seminary[4] in New York City. He previously taught at Harvard before leaving the school after a highly publicized dispute with then-president Lawrence Summers, and has also spent time teaching at the University of Paris. The bulk of West's work focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their "radical conditionedness." West draws intellectual contributions from multiple traditions, including Christianity, the black church, Marxism, neopragmatism, and transcendentalism.[5][6][7][8] Among his most influential books are Race Matters (1994) and Democracy Matters (2004). West is a frequent media commentator on political and social issues. He often appears on networks such as CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Fox News and PBS and programs such as Real Time With Bill Maher, The Colbert Report, and The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson.[9] Since 2010 he has also co-hosted a radio program with Tavis Smiley, called Smiley and West. He has also been featured in several documentaries, and made appearances in Hollywood films The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, also providing commentary for the films. He has also made several spoken word and hip hop albums, and has been named MTV's Artist of the Week for his work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornel_West Image By Peabody Awards [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

• published: 30 Nov 2014
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