Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has been elected to an Honorary Fellowship to Clare College. Professor Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

He is one of the world’s foremost scholars of the literature and culture of the African diaspora, and is a prolific author and award-winning documentary filmmaker. In 1981, he was included in the first class to receive the MacArthur Fellowship (the “Genius Grant”). Professor Gates came to Clare as Mellon Fellow in 1973 from Yale, where he was a Scholar of the House and graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in History, after being elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society in his junior year.  He received his PhD in English Language and Literature at Cambridge in 1979.