Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Finding Our Roots, Shaping American Culture
It has been a busy and remarkable first half of 2026 for scholar, storyteller, and cultural icon Professor Henry Louis (Skip) Gates, Jr. (Clare College 1973), whose work has helped generations better understand Black history and identity—and, by extension, America itself.
On January 6, 2026, the CAm Board Member returned to PBS to open the twelfth season of his Emmy-nominated series Finding Your Roots. For more than a decade, the show has sparked meaningful conversations about history, identity, and belonging by combining genealogy and genetics to illuminate the family stories of its well-known guests. Season twelve concluded in April with the episode “Rags to Riches,” featuring businessman Barry Diller and actor Kate Burton. Through this deeply personal approach to history, Professor Gates has become one of the world’s most revered historians and a defining figure in American culture.
Reflecting on the emotional impact of the series, he has said, “Your genome is a walking family tree. These people aren't gone. They're inside you.”
Beyond Finding Your Roots, Professor Gates has continued to expand the scope of public historical understanding. In February 2026, PBS aired Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History, a four-part series exploring the complex, intertwined histories of Black and Jewish communities in the United States. His enduring commitment to bringing nuance and humanity to conversations about differences has shaped a career that bridges elite academic scholarship and broad public engagement.
Just in the past few years, Professor Gates’s contributions to the humanities have been recognized with several major honors, including the PEN Audible Literary Service Award, the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal, the Barry Prize, the Vilcek Prize for Excellence in Literary Scholarship, the Modern Language Association’s Phyllis Franklin Award for Public Advocacy of the Humanities, the Newberry Library Award, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal.
A prolific author as well as a filmmaker, he has written or coauthored numerous books spanning literary criticism, history, biography, and cultural studies. His long list of honorary degrees includes one from his undergraduate alma mater, Yale University, and one from his graduate alma mater, the University of Cambridge, an honor conferred on him in 2022 at the same ceremony as his mentor, Professor Wole Soyinka, and fellow alumnus Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, both figures who have been important influences in his intellectual life.
An American literary scholar and Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker, Professor Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. His early literary criticism drew global acclaim for his pioneering theories of African and African American literature. He introduced the notion of “signifying” to represent African and African American literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before.
As Professor Gates has powerfully observed, “It’s a stirring fact that if our enslaved ancestors were listed on documents of property, nevertheless, they left behind an incredible amount of cultural wealth, which continues to enrich world civilization today.”
Through scholarship, storytelling, and an unwavering dedication to truth, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. continues to help us discover that wealth—and, in doing so, better understand ourselves.
You can watch the renowned, Emmy-nominated “Finding Your Roots” here.