West Campus student discussion with Sir Hilary Beckles
Alice Cook House
West Campus student discussion with Sir Hilary Beckles (Vice-Chancellor, University of the West Indies-UWI; A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell)
Wednesday, March 26, at Alice Cook House
5:00pm
Open to all.
For circulation: “The Case for Reparations in the Caribbean”
Hosts: Chantal Thomas (Vice Dean and the Radice Family Professor of Law, Cornell Law School; Director of the Cornell Center for Global Economic Justice; and Faculty Director for the Clarke Initiative for Law and Development in the Middle East and North Africa)
Bassel Khoury (House Assistant Dean, Alice Cook House)
About the speaker: Sir Hilary Beckles, is the eighth vice chancellor of The University of the West Indies-UWI and a distinguished academic, international thought leader, United Nations committee official, and global public activist in the field of sustainability, social justice and minority empowerment. He is president of Universities Caribbean, chair of the Caribbean Examinations Council, chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission, and advisor on sustainable development to former United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon. He was knighted by the government of Barbados in 2007.
In 2021, Sir Hilary received the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace and Freedom Award. In 2022, he was elected as an Andrew D. White Professor-At-Large at Cornell University. Also in 2022, Sir Hilary presented an Einaudi Distinguished Speaker Series lecture at Cornell. In 2024, he was appointed as Chairman/Chancellor of the United Nations University (Tokyo), begin in May 2025.
Sir Hilary has published over 100 peer reviewed essays in scholarly journals, eight plays, and over 13 books on subjects ranging from Atlantic and Caribbean History to gender relations in the Caribbean, sport development, and popular culture. The breadth of Beckles’s scholarship and its generalizability to many fields has captured the interests and imaginations of a vast array of audiences worldwide.
A highly sought-after speaker, Sir Hilary has lectured extensively throughout Europe and Asia. Beckles received his higher education in the United Kingdom and graduated in 1976 with a B.A. (Hons) degree in Economic and Social History from The University of Hull, and a Ph.D. from the same university in 1980.
This event is part of an A.D. White Professors-at-Large (ADW-PAL) visit and is cosponsored by the Dept. of History and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program.