Genealogy, Genetics, and American History: 2026 Richard Payne Lecture
About this Event
The Richard Payne Lecture and Award in Faith, Justice, and Health Care highlights and honors academic, clinical, and lay leaders who in their work and research embody the late Dr. Payne’s spirit of caring for the whole person.
About the 2026 Payne Lecture
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.—the Emmy- and Peabody-winning scholar behind PBS's Finding Your Roots—will deliver the 2026 Richard Payne Lecture, "Genealogy, Genetics, and American History." Drawing on decades spent tracing family histories through DNA science and archival research, Gates will explore how genealogy and genetics have reshaped our understanding of race, identity, and the American past. The talk builds on his work as director of Harvard's Hutchins Center for African & African American Research and his latest book, The Black Box: Writing the Race, named one of the New York Times' 100 Best Books of 2024.
About Dr. Gates
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. An Emmy, Du Pont, and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, and institution builder, he has published numerous books and produced and hosted an array of documentary films about Black History, including, most recently, Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History (PBS, 2026). Gates’s groundbreaking genealogy and genetics series, Finding Your Roots, which received a Primetime Emmy nomination, is now in production on its thirteenth season on PBS. His latest book, The Black Box: Writing the Race (Penguin Random House, 2024), was named one of the New York Times 100 Best Books of the Year.
A native of Piedmont, West Virginia, Gates is a recipient of numerous honorary degrees, including from his undergraduate alma mater, Yale University, his graduate alma mater, the University of Cambridge, where he is an honorary Fellow, and most recently the University of Oxford. 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, conferred by President William Jefferson Clinton. In 2001 he discovered the first novel written by a Black female author, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, by Hannah Craft, the holograph manuscript of which he donated to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library.
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. His other awards include the PEN Audible Literary Service Award, the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal, the Barry Prize, the Vilcek Prize for Excellence in Literary Scholarship, the Modern Language Association’s Phyllis Franklin Award for Public Advocacy of the Humanities, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal. Gates is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an International Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts.
This program is co-sponsored by the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School; the Kenan Institute for Ethics and The Purpose Project at Duke; Duke University Chapel; and the Center on Law, Race, and Policy at Duke Law School.
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