Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at Berklee THURSDAY - Free and Open to the Public

On Thursday, February 13th, Harvard University's Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. will present the sixth annual Dr. Warrick L. Carter Lecture, entitled “Encarta Africana: W.E.B. Dubois to John Coltrane" at 1 p.m. in the David Friend Recital Hall, 921 Boylston Street, Boston. Part of Berklee College of Music's Black History Month Music Celebration 2003, the event is free and open to the public. For information, call 617-747-2261.

Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., whose many honors include a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant" (1981), is one of the most celebrated African- American intellectuals teaching and writing today. A Yale University honors graduate, he became the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in its 800-year history. Dr. Gates is the W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Humanities, Chair of Afro-American Studies, and Director of the W.E.B DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University. Before joining the faculty of Harvard in 1991, he taught at Yale, Cornell, and Duke Universities.

Professor Gates is co-editor with K. Anthony Appiah of the encyclopedia Encarta Africana published on CD-ROM by Microsoft (1999), and in book form by Basic Civitas Books under the title Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (1999). He is the author of Wonders of the African World (1999), the book companion to the six-hour BBC/PBS television series of the same name. Professor Gates has also authored numerous works of literary criticism, including Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the 'Racial' Self (Oxford University Press, 1987); The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1988), winner of the 1989 American Book Award; and Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (Oxford, 1992).

Berklee's tradition of scholarly lectures as part of Black History Month was initiated by Dr. Warrick L. Carter, who served as Dean of Faculty and later as Provost/Vice President for Academic Affairs at Berklee from 1984 to 1996. Dr. Carter worked with the Community Service program at Berklee to help serve the educational needs of the area's black community, and his work contributed to diversity and the hiring of minorities and women at Berklee. In appreciation and recognition of his many enduring contributions to Berklee, the Board of Trustees established the annual Dr. Warrick L. Carter Lecture Series as an integral highlight of Berklee