About Us

The Institute

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Director

The W. E. B. Du Bois Institute is the nation’s oldest research center dedicated to the study of the history, culture, and social institutions of Africans and African Americans. Named after the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1895), the Institute was established in May 1975 to create fellowships that would “facilitate the writing of doctoral dissertations in areas related to Afro- American Studies.” Today, the Institute awards up to twenty fellowships annually to scholars at various stages of their careers in the fields of African and African American Studies, broadly defined to cover the expanse of the African Diaspora. The Du Bois Institute’s research projects and visiting fellows form the vital nucleus around which revolve a stimulating array of lecture series, art exhibitions, readings, conferences, and archival and publication projects.

Contacting the Institute

W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for
African and African American Research Harvard University
104 Mount Auburn Street, 3R
Cambridge, MA 02138

Phone: 617.495.8508
Fax: 617.495.8511

Staff Directory
Directons to the Institute

Fellows Program

The 2013-2014 Fellowship Application is Now Available

Annual Report

Download a PDF of the 2012 Annual Report

From the letter from the Director:

The W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University has experienced a most colorful history since its establishment in 1975. After a protracted struggle for its very existence, the first home of the Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research was in Canaday B, a new dormitory in Harvard Yard. After a few years, and a great deal of lobbying, the Institute moved to somewhat more generous digs at 44 Brattle Street, over the Harvest Restaurant. When Anthony Appiah and I arrived at Harvard in 1991 with our mandate to assemble a worldclass team in Afro-American Studies, we took up residence at busy 1414 Massachusetts Avenue, over CVS and next to the Harvard Coop. In 1997, we achieved a dramatically new kind of status at the university, sharing a space with the Department of Afro-American Studies in the newly refurbished Barker Humanities Center at 12 Quincy Street. (more)