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Henry Louis Gates, Jr., noted author, W.E.B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities, and director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University, will deliver the commencement address at Hamilton College on Sunday, May 23, at 10:30 a.m.

Gates was named to Time Magazine's list of "25 most influential Americans" list in 1997.

Gates is the author of several works of literary criticism, including Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the 'Racial' Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, which was the 1989 winner of the American Book Award; and Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. He has also authored Colored People: A Memoir, which traces his childhood experiences in a small West Virginia town in the 1950s and 1960s; The Future of the Race, co-authored with Cornel West; and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.

Professor Gates has edited several anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of African American Literature and The Oxford-Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers. In addition, he is a co-editor of Transitions magazine.

An influential cultural critic, Gates' publications include a 1994 cover story for Time magazine on the new black Renaissance in art, as well as numerous articles for The New Yorker. He and Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah are the co-editors of an encyclopedia about the African diaspora. This work was published in January by Mircrosoft as a CD-ROM entitled Encarta Africana and as a single volume print edition forthcoming in November from Perseus Books as Africana: The Encyclopedia of Africa and the African-American Experience.

Professor Gates earned his master's degree and Ph.D in English Literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge. He received a bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1973. Before joining the faculty of Harvard in 1991, he taught at Yale, Cornell and Duke universities. His honors and grants include a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" (1981), the George Polk Award for Social Commentary (1993), Chicago Tribune Heartland Award (1994), the Golden Plate Achievement Award (1995), and a National Humanities Medal (1998).

The commencement ceremony, which begins at 10:30 a.m, will take place on the Main Quadrangle, or in the event of inclement weather, in the Margaret Bundy Scott Field House. Approximately 449 Hamilton students will receive bachelor's degrees during the ceremony, which marks the end of the college's 187th academic year.

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