The Invention of Race: A Conversation with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew S. Curran

The School for Advanced Research hosts Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Harvard University), and Andrew S. Curran (Wesleyan University) for an SAR President’s Lecture about the search for a scientific understanding of the concept of race in eighteenth-century Europe. Drs. Gates and Curran will address the origins of anti-Black racism and colorism and its impacts worldwide. Their evaluations of a series of European essays from 1739 on “sources of ‘blackness'” were published in a book titled Who’s Black and Why? (Harvard University Press) in 2022.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the author of numerous books and has written extensively on the history of race and anti-Black racism in the Enlightenment. His most recent works include Stony the Road, and The Black Church. He is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for the African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Andrew S. Curran is a leading specialist in the Enlightenment era and the author of The Anatomy of Blackness and Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. He is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University.

Chelsi West Ohueri, moderator
SAR Weatherhead Fellow, 2021-2022
Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Austin