An award-winning Argentine author, an agro-sustainability innovator, a renowned archaeologist and a leading sociolinguist are set to visit campus this spring as Andrew Dickson White Professors-at-Large.

Twice during their terms professors-at-large, who are considered full members of the Cornell faculty, spend several days on the Ithaca campus while classes are in session to interact with students and faculty. The visits aim to enliven the intellectual and cultural life of the university and greater community through public lectures, informal meetings and other events.

Martín Caparrós (humanities): The distinguished Argentine author, writer and narrative journalist will be on campus March 7-11. Caparrós has written more than 30 books and in 2017 was awarded the Maria Moors Cabot award by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism for outstanding reporting on America. For his nonfiction, book-length work El Hambre (Hunger: The Mortal Crisis of Our Time), the author visited the richest and poorest people on earth to explore why hunger is one of today’s big unresolved issues.

Bram Govaerts (life sciences): Govaerts, the director general of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center and a major innovator in the ongoing agro-sustainable movement, will be on campus March 14-18. Govaerts, who specializes in the fields of bioscience engineering and soil sciences, brings together multidisciplinary science and development teams to improve nutrition, nature conservation and national and international resilience and security.

Lynn Meskell (social sciences): Meskell, professor of anthropology and historic preservation and museum curator at the University of Pennsylvania, will be here April 18-22. She is a world-renowned archaeologist whose work has transformed thinking on the way human society is shaped by a material world of bodies, places, things and the ruins of the past. She has published five books and her latest, “A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage and the Dream of Peace,” was awarded the 2019 Best Book Award from the Society for American Archaeology.

John Rickford (social sciences): Rickford, a world-renowned expert on African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and the study of linguistic variation and change, will be here May 3-9. He is professor of linguistics emeritus at Stanford University and his recent work analyzes the adverse consequences of the misunderstanding of AAVE in criminal trials. Since the 1970s he has worked to document AAVE and other varieties of English spoken throughout North America and the Caribbean, which has contributed to the understanding of the grammatical regularities and structure of AAVE. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.

The professors-at-large program at Cornell sponsors outstanding scholars and public intellectuals from America and abroad who have achieved high international distinction in the life sciences, physical sciences, humanities, social sciences and the arts.

The professors-at-large program was conceptualized by Andrew Dickson White, the university’s first president, and officially created in 1965. White proposed that nonresident professors should periodically visit the university so Cornell faculty could stay connected to the outside world.

Details of 2022 events will be added to the Andrew D. White Professors-at-Large Program website as they are finalized.