Event details
Dec
5
Mountain Memories: Stories of Our Appalachian Boyhoods
The James Madison Program is honored to be welcoming to Princeton University the eminent literary scholar, historian, film-maker, and public intellectual Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of Harvard University. Professor Gates, who hails from Keyser, West Virginia, will be discussing his upbringing in the heart of Appalachia with his friend and fellow West Virginian, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Robert P. George.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has published numerous books and produced and hosted an array of documentary films. The Black Church (PBS) and Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches (HBO), which he executive produced, each received Emmy nominations. Finding Your Roots, Gates’s groundbreaking genealogy and genetics series, which just completed its tenth season on PBS, has been nominated for a Primetime Emmy (2024). His most recent history series, Gospel, premiered on PBS in February 2024. His latest book is The Black Box: Writing the Race (Penguin Random House, 2024).
Gates is a recipient of a number of honorary degrees, including from his alma mater, the University of Cambridge, and most recently, The London School of Economics. 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. In 2001 he discovered the first novel written by a Black female author, The Bondwoman’s Narrative,by Hannah Craft.
A native of Piedmont, West Virginia, Gates earned his B.A. in History, summa cum laude, from Yale University in 1973, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Clare College at Cambridge in 1979, where he is also an Honorary Fellow. A former chair of the Pulitzer Prize board, he 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, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of America, and The Studio Museum of Harlem. In 2011, his portrait, by Yuqi Wang, was hung in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. In 2023, his portrait, by Kerry James Marshall, was hung at the Fitzwilliam Museum at The University of Cambridge. He was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society in his junior year. In July, 2024, he was awarded the prestigious Spingarn Medal from the NAACP.
Robert P. George holds Princeton's celebrated McCormick Professorship of Jurisprudence and is the Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He has served as Chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and before that on the President’s Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST). He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award.
He is the author of In Defense of Natural Law; Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality; The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis; Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism; and co-author of Embryo: A Defense of Human Life; Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics; What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense; and Conjugal Union: What Marriage Is and Why It Matters. His scholarly articles and reviews have appeared in such journals as the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the American Journal of Jurisprudence, the Review of Metaphysics and the Review of Politics.
Professor George is a recipient of many honors and awards, including the Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Sidney Hook Memorial Award of the National Association of Scholars, the Philip Merrill Award of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Bradley Prize for Intellectual and Civic Achievement, the Barry Prize of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute, and Princeton University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.
He has given honorific lectures at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, the University of St. Andrews, and Cornell University, and many other universities in the United States and abroad.
A graduate of Swarthmore College, he holds M.T.S. and J.D. degrees from Harvard University and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., and D.Litt. from Oxford University, in addition to twenty-three honorary doctorates.
Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any event does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has published numerous books and produced and hosted an array of documentary films. The Black Church (PBS) and Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches (HBO), which he executive produced, each received Emmy nominations. Finding Your Roots, Gates’s groundbreaking genealogy and genetics series, which just completed its tenth season on PBS, has been nominated for a Primetime Emmy (2024). His most recent history series, Gospel, premiered on PBS in February 2024. His latest book is The Black Box: Writing the Race (Penguin Random House, 2024).
Gates is a recipient of a number of honorary degrees, including from his alma mater, the University of Cambridge, and most recently, The London School of Economics. 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. In 2001 he discovered the first novel written by a Black female author, The Bondwoman’s Narrative,by Hannah Craft.
A native of Piedmont, West Virginia, Gates earned his B.A. in History, summa cum laude, from Yale University in 1973, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Clare College at Cambridge in 1979, where he is also an Honorary Fellow. A former chair of the Pulitzer Prize board, he 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, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of America, and The Studio Museum of Harlem. In 2011, his portrait, by Yuqi Wang, was hung in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. In 2023, his portrait, by Kerry James Marshall, was hung at the Fitzwilliam Museum at The University of Cambridge. He was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society in his junior year. In July, 2024, he was awarded the prestigious Spingarn Medal from the NAACP.
Robert P. George holds Princeton's celebrated McCormick Professorship of Jurisprudence and is the Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He has served as Chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and before that on the President’s Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST). He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award.
He is the author of In Defense of Natural Law; Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality; The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis; Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism; and co-author of Embryo: A Defense of Human Life; Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics; What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense; and Conjugal Union: What Marriage Is and Why It Matters. His scholarly articles and reviews have appeared in such journals as the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the American Journal of Jurisprudence, the Review of Metaphysics and the Review of Politics.
Professor George is a recipient of many honors and awards, including the Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Sidney Hook Memorial Award of the National Association of Scholars, the Philip Merrill Award of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Bradley Prize for Intellectual and Civic Achievement, the Barry Prize of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute, and Princeton University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.
He has given honorific lectures at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, the University of St. Andrews, and Cornell University, and many other universities in the United States and abroad.
A graduate of Swarthmore College, he holds M.T.S. and J.D. degrees from Harvard University and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., and D.Litt. from Oxford University, in addition to twenty-three honorary doctorates.
Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any event does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.
Speakers
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor; Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University
Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence; Director, James Madison Program in American Ideals & Institutions, Princeton University
Sponsorship of an event does not constitute institutional endorsement of external speakers or views presented.