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.