“An important collection of documents on scientific racism.”
HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates’s most recent books are Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow and The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song. He has also produced and hosted more than 20 documentary films, most recently The Black Church on PBS and Black Art: In the Absence of Light for HBO. Finding Your Roots, his groundbreaking genealogy and genetics series, is now in its seventh season on PBS.
He is a recipient of a number of honorary degrees, most recently a Litt.D. from his alma mater, the University of Cambridge. 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. 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. He is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society.
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ANDREW S. CURRAN
is a writer, specialist of eighteenth-century France, and the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Paris Review, and The Wall Street Journal. He is also the author of three previous books. His most recent book, Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019), was named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by Kirkus Reviews, The Australian, The Independent, NRC, and The Irish Times. Curran’s previous book was The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Era of Enlightenment, which was A Choice Outstanding Academic Title and also received the 2018 Louis Marin Prize from the French Académie des sciences d’outre-mer. Curran is a fellow at the New York Academy of Medicine and a Chevalier dans l’ordre des Palmes académiques.
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FURTHER CREDITS:
To translate the essays found in Who’s Black and Why, Professors Gates and Curran worked with a superb team of four translators. The French essays were translated by Karen C.C. Dalton, Director and Curator of the Image of the Black Archive & Library (a project of The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research) and Dr. Susan Emanuel, a renowned professional translator of numerous books of French scholarship into English. Translations of the Latin submissions were provided by Dr. Sheldon Cheek, an art historian and researcher at the Hutchins Center, and Dr. Rosanna Giammanco, the Principal at Verbum Linguistic Services and translator of more than thirty books from Latin and Italian into English. Sheldon Cheek is also a key player in the Who’s Black and Why? timeline project.