Sir Hilary Beckles
PVC and Principal - Cave Hill Campus
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An internationally recognised academic and author, Sir Hilary Beckles is also the overall Coordinator of Sports for the UWI campuses and is married with two sons.
As a historian, Sir Hilary has lectured at universities in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas and has served on numerous editorial boards.
He ia a Professor of Economic and Social History and is a member of the International Task Force for the UNESCO Slave Route Project and is principal consultant for resource material in the schools programme.He is also Consultant for the UNESCO Cities for Peace Global Programme and an advisor to the UN World Culture Report.
In 2002 he led the Barbados national delegation to the UN Conference on Race in Durban, South Africa.
He chairs the UWI Task Force on the Globalization and Liberalization of Higher Education.
Sir Hilary was knighted in 2007, by the Government of Barbados for his distinguished service in the field of education, particularly at the university level and his dedication to the furtherance of arts and cricket.
He was born in Barbados in 1955 and received his secondary education in Barbados and the United Kingdom and his higher education in the United Kingdom. He holds a BA (Hons) degree in Economic History from Hull University and a PhD from the same University.
He joined the History Department at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona Campus in 1979 as a lecturer; in 1984 he transferred to the Cave Hill Campus in Barbados and was promoted to a personal professorship in 1993 at age thirty-seven, the youngest in the history of UWI.
Sir Hilary has served the University as a Head of the History Department and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. In 1994 he won the first University of the West Indies Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in the field of research. In 1998 he was appointed Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Undergraduate Studies and returned to the Mona Campus.
In August 2002 he returned to Cave Hill as Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Principal. In 2003, he received an Honorary Doctor of Letters for outstanding work as a scholar from his Alma Mater.
Sir Hilary has published over ten monographs, including:
Liberties Lost: The Native Caribbean and Slave Societies (Cambridge University Press, 2004, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados 1627-1715;
Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society; The History of Barbados (Cambridge University Press, 1990);
Corporate Power in Barbados: Economic Injustice in a Political Democracy, 1990;
Natural Rebels: A History of Enslaved Black Women in the Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 1989);
A two-volume work on West Indies cricket, The Development of West Indies Cricket: Volume One, The Age of Nationalism; and Volume Two, The Age of Globalisation, (Pluto Press 1999). The Development of West Indies Cricket was described in Wisden Cricket Monthly, August 1999 as “the most important cricket book ever written”.
His book, A Nation Imagined: The First West Indies Test Team: The 1928 Tour (Ian Randle Publishers, June 2003) was commissioned by the West Indies Cricket Board to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of West Indies Cricket.
He is co-author of a recent book entitled, “The Brain Train: Quality Higher Education and Caribbean Development,” a monograph published in April 2002.