Through all the work runs the dichotomy of race. They are the corollary of a teaching career that has taken him from Yale to Cornell to Duke to Harvard. His projects travel with him in many instances. Gates's latest effort is a multimedia digital encyclopedia of African culture, Encarta Africana. For twenty years he and his colleagues have gathered fragments of a culture, amassing more than forty thousand texts for the Black Periodical Literature Project and enough material for fifty-two volumes on African American Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century for the Schomburg Center in New York.
He has unearthed old periodicals, edited dictionaries and anthologies, and written a dozen books. Gates, this year's Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, has been untiring in his quest. "I've always thought of myself as both a literary historian and a literary critic," says Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "someone who loves archives and someone who is dedicated to resurrecting texts that have dropped out of sight."
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