Award-winning writer, journalist, and activist P. (Palagummi) Sainath has been appointed as A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University for a six-year term (2024-30) in the field of Social Science. Sarah Besky (Associate Professor; Global Labor & Work, School of Industrial and Labor Relations; Director, South Asia Program, Einaudi Center for International Studies) and Neema Kudva (Professor, City and Regional Planning; Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, AAP) serve as faculty host and co-host, respectively.

Based in Mumbai, India, Sainath serves as founder and editor of People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), an independent multimedia digital platform showcasing the stories of rural people and everyday life to bear on contemporary Indian politics.

As an investigative reporter, teacher, and advocate for rural issues, Sainath has won over 60 national and international reporting awards and fellowships, including the Fukuoka Grand Prize (2021), World Media Summit award (2014), and Amnesty International’s Inaugural Global Human Rights Reporting Prize (2000), as well as the Ramon Magsaysay Award (2007), Asia’s most prestigious prize, often referred to as the ‘Asian Nobel.’

Demonstrating an expansive range on politics, public archives, and storytelling, Sainath’s prizewinning book Everybody Loves a Good Drought (1996), exploring 1990s-era liberalization through rural lives and work, has remained a non-fiction bestseller by an Indian author for years and was declared a Penguin Classic in 2012. In recent years, he has published well over 150 investigative reports on India’s agrarian crisis in The Hindu, the largest journalistic body of work ever on India’s farming communities.

Since 2001, a curated exhibition of Sainath’s original photographs – Visible Work, Invisible Women: Women & Work in Rural India – has toured India and has been hosted at the Asia Society (NY), International House of Japan (Tokyo), and several universities across North America.

Sainath has taught journalism at the Sophia Polytechnic in Mumbai for over 20 years, holds an adjunct appointment at the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai, India, and has held visiting appointments at various institutions including UC Berkeley and Princeton University. Sainath received a B.A. from Loyola College in Madras (1977) and an M.A. from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi (1979).

The Professors-at-Large Program at sponsors outstanding scholars and public intellectuals in the life sciences, physical sciences, humanities, social sciences and the arts. Previous professors-at-large include writer and actor John Cleese, primatologist Jane Goodall, jazz great Wynton Marsalis and novelist Toni Morrison, M.A. ’55.

Twice during their terms, professors-at-large visit campus for about a week while classes are in session to interact with the Cornell community under a single mandate: to enliven the intellectual and cultural life of the university.