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Conversations Across the Diaspora, hosted by Sarah Ladipo Manyika

A new interactive series brings you eclectic conversations from across the African diaspora. Join author and host Sarah Ladipo Manyika for talks with some of the most exciting voices from Berlin to Harare, from Tamale to London and New York and everywhere in between. We’ll introduce you to all sorts of folks—some you will know, others you may never have heard of, but never the usual suspects talking about the usual topics.

We’ll be speaking with everyone from actors to poets, scholars, athletes, entrepreneurs, architects, artists and many more. Come join us!

This month we feature a conversation between Sarah Ladipo Manyika and historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. After you register you will receive information to join via zoom on April 9th at 12 noon (Pacific Daylight Time) / 8pm (UK). If you don’t see an email from MoAD in your inbox, please check your spam or junk mailbox.

Learn about past Conversations Across the Diaspora programs, including links to recordings of the events on MoAD’s blog.‍

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 Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or co-authored twenty-four books and created twenty-one documentary films, including Wonders of the African World, African American Lives, Faces of America, Black in Latin America, Black America since MLK: And Still I Rise, and Africa’s Great Civilizations.

Finding Your Roots, his groundbreaking genealogy series now in its sixth season on PBS, has been called “one of the deepest and wisest series ever on television,” leveraging “the inherent entertainment capacity of the medium to educate millions of Americans about the histories and cultures of our nation and the world.

”Professor Gates’s six-part PBS documentary series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (2013), which he wrote, executive produced, and hosted, earned the Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program—Long Form, as well as the Peabody Award, Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and NAACP Image Award. His latest projects are the history series, Reconstruction: America after the Civil War (PBS, 2019), winner of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and the related books, Dark Sky Rising: Reconstruction and the Dawn of Jim Crow, with Tonya Bolden (Scholastic, 2019), and Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (Penguin Random House, 2019), a New York Times Notable Book of 2019.

Having written for such leading publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Time, Professor Gates serves as chairman of TheRoot.com, a daily online magazine he co-founded in 2008, and chair of the Creative Board of FUSION TV. He oversees the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field, and has received grant funding to develop a Finding Your Roots curriculum to teach students science through genetics and genealogy. In 2012, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader, a collection of his writings edited by Abby Wolf, was published.

The recipient of fifty-six honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor 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. He was named to Time’s 25 Most Influential Americans list in 1997, to Ebony’s Power 150 list in 2009, and to Ebony’s Power 100 list in 2010 and 2012. He 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 the University of Cambridge in 1979.

In 2018, he was one of 15 alumni of African descent honored in the exhibition, Black Cantabs: History Makers, at the Cambridge University Library. He also is an Honorary Fellow, Clare College, at the University of Cambridge.

Professor Gates has directed the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research—now the Hutchins Center—since arriving at Harvard in 1991, and during his first fifteen years on campus, he chaired the Department of Afro-American Studies as it expanded into the Department of African and African American Studies with a full-fledged doctoral program. 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, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of America, and the Brookings Institution. In 2017, the Organization of American States named Gates a Goodwill Ambassador for the Rights of People of African Descent in the Americas.

In 2011, his portrait, by Yuqi Wang, was hung in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Sarah Ladipo Manyika was raised in Nigeria and has lived in Kenya, France, Zimbabwe, and England. Sarah is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist and founding books editor for Ozy.com. Her debut novel, In Dependence, is an international bestseller while her second novel, Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun, has been translated into a number of languages.

Her nonfiction includes personal essays and intimate profiles of people she meets from Mrs. Harris and Pastor Evan Mawarire to Toni Morrison, Margaret Busby and Michelle Obama. Sarah previously served on MoAD’s board and currently serves as Board President for the women’s writing residency, Hedgebrook. Sarah is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a San Francisco Public Library Laureate, and a member of the National Books Critics Circle.

This program series is made possible by the generous support of Peggy Woodford Forbes