Ending a year of uncertainty over the future of Harvard’s Afro-American studies department, DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. announced yesterday that he will permanently remain at the University.

Gates had spent nearly a year considering an offer to join the faculty at Princeton University, a move that many at Harvard feared he would make.

But the chair of Afro-American studies said yesterday he will remain in Cambridge to lay the groundwork for the department’s future.

“I thought it was best, given the departures of my dear friends Anthony Appiah and Cornel West, that I remain behind to maintain stability as the department attempts to rebuild,” he said in an interview. “Part of my legacy as an academic will be this department, and I want it not only to survive but to thrive.”

Gates said he aims to recruit five new professors, building on the recent appointments of Michael C. Dawson in government and Afro-American studies and Evelynn Hammonds in Afro-American studies and history of science. He said that the searches have already begun and that he hopes to make one or two appointments by the end of this year.

Bolstering the department’s ranks is a goal widely shared goal by its faculty and University administrators.

“There’s a sense that we’ll never fully recover from losing people like Cornel West and Anthony Appiah,” said Lawrence D. Bobo, Tishman and Diker professor of sociology and of Afro-American studies. “I think now we need to set about the business of rebuilding.”

University President Lawrence H. Summers also alluded to future appointments in a written statement released yesterday.

“I look forward to working with Skip and his colleagues and with those who will join the department and the DuBois Institute in the months and years ahead,” Summers said. “The important issues surrounding the African-American experience deserve Harvard’s fullest attention.”

Gates said he is also concerned with strengthening the department’s fledgling doctoral program, which he said is “still quite vulnerable.”

Yesterday’s announcement brought to an end a year-long period of anxiety over Gates’ academic future.

His colleagues used words such as “delighted” and “thrilled” to express their reaction to his decision.

“I hugged him when he first told me he was going to stay and we hugged one another again today when he said word was official,” Bobo said. “A strong department has just retained the charismatic leader that built it.”

Gates had been publicly considering an offer to join Princeton’s faculty since the last winter’s conflict between Summers and former Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74, a conflict that Gates has said made him question the University’s commitment to the department.

That doubt, Gates said, has now been laid to rest. He said yesterday he is “more than persuaded” that “Afro-American studies is central to President Summers’ conception of the liberal arts university and to Dean Kirby’s mission as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.”