PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — During its Commencement and Reunion Weekend from May 23 to 25, Brown University will confer honorary doctorates on seven candidates who have achieved great distinction in a variety of fields. The candidates are:
- Jon Batiste — Award-winning musician
- Allyson Felix — Olympic gold medalist
- Eileen Hayes — Social services leader
- Suleika Jaouad — Author and artist
- William Kentridge — Artist
- Timothy Snyder — Historian
- Kevin Young — Award-winning poet
Recipients will receive prominent recognition at the University Ceremony on Sunday, May 25. Felix, who is a five-time Olympian and the most decorated American track and field athlete in history, will deliver the Baccalaureate address to the University’s undergraduate Class of 2025 on Saturday afternoon at the First Baptist Church in America. The ceremony will be livestreamed on Brown’s Commencement website.
Honorary degrees are awarded by the Board of Fellows of the Corporation of Brown University and are conferred by University President Christina H. Paxson during Commencement exercises.
While the Board of Fellows awards the degrees, many of the recipients were recommended by the Advisory Committee on Honorary Degrees, a faculty and student committee chaired this year by Professor of English Richard Rambuss. The committee offered recommendations for leaders who have demonstrated excellence in a variety of fields, including based on nominations received from Brown faculty, staff and students.
Honorary degree recipients do not serve as Commencement speakers; since its earliest days, Brown has reserved that honor for members of the graduating class. Additional details on Commencement forums and other events during the weekend will be posted on Brown’s Commencement website.
Honorary degree candidates
Jon Batiste
Doctor of Music
Award-winning musician
Jon Batiste is a seven-time Grammy and Academy Award-winning singer, songwriter and composer who is among the most prolific and accomplished contemporary musicians globally.
Born in New Orleans, Batiste is known for powerful music that draws on classical, jazz, R&B and soul. He has released eight studio albums and won, among many honors, an Academy Award for “Best Original Score” for the 2020 Disney-Pixar film “Soul.” His 2021 album “We Are” was nominated for a historic 11 Grammys Awards across seven categories. In 2024, he released his most recent studio album, “Beethoven Blues (Batiste Piano Series, Vol. 1),” which is the first in his solo piano series, reimagining classical works through a fresh lens.
Along with his wife — author and artist Suleika Jaouad — Batiste was the subject of the Oscar and Grammy-nominated 2023 documentary “American Symphony,” which won a Grammy for “Best Music Film” along with an Oscar nomination for “Best Original Song.”
Batiste serves as a creative director for the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. From 2015 until 2022, he served as the bandleader and musical director of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on CBS.
Batiste earned a bachelor’s degree and a master of music from the Juilliard School.
Allyson Felix
Doctor of Humane Letters
Olympic gold medalist
Five-time Olympian Allyson Felix is the most decorated American track and field athlete in history.
With a record 20 world championships and 11 Olympic medals, including seven golds, Felix retired in 2022 leaving a historic legacy in competitive running. In 2024, she was elected to the International Olympic Committee, the governing body of the Olympic Games.
An influential voice in women’s athletics, Felix publicly advocated for improved maternity policies in the sports apparel industry and helped spur maternity protections for sponsored athletes. Ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, she led an initiative to create the first-ever family space in the Olympic Village to support parent-athletes during the games.
Felix is the founder of Saysh footwear for women, a company that challenges traditional gendered sneaker design, and co-founder of Always Alpha, a women’s sports management firm. She serves as an ambassador for Right to Play, which supports underserved children across the world, and co-founded the Power of She Fund at the Women’s Sports Foundation to help provide childcare support for athletes who are mothers.
Felix earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California. She and her husband live in Los Angeles with their two children.
Eileen Hayes
Doctor of Humane Letters
Social services leader
For 24 years, Eileen Hayes has served as president and CEO of Amos House, a Rhode Island social services organization that has supported generations of individuals and families.
A compassionate visionary who began her career as a social worker, Hayes helped transform Amos House from a soup kitchen to a multifaceted organization that offers employment programs, services and housing to individuals facing poverty, hunger, homelessness and addiction.
Under her leadership, Amos House launched two social enterprises, More Than a Meal Catering and Amos House Builds, both of which employ graduates of its training programs and generate income to support the organization. Its housing portfolio has grown to house hundreds of individuals, families, children and older adults in apartments, rooming houses and shelters. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization managed a warming center in Providence that served more than 200 individuals a night.
Hayes has channeled her experience, success and dedication to serving as a mentor and trainer across her field and an adviser on program design and implementation for other organizations. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Hunter College and a master of social work from New York University. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and has four children and two grandchildren.
Suleika Jaouad
Doctor of Letters
Author and artist
Suleika Jaouad is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, artist, advocate and New York Times bestselling author of “Between Two Kingdoms” and “The Book of Alchemy.”
After a leukemia diagnosis at age 22, she launched her widely read New York Times column and video series “Life, Interrupted” from her hospital bed. Her essays and reporting have appeared in publications including the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic and Vogue.
Jaouad created the Isolation Journals, a newsletter founded at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that helps 200,000 people from around the world tap into the transformative power of creativity. She and her husband, musician Jon Batiste, are the subject of the Oscar-nominated and Grammy Award-winning documentary “American Symphony,” which portrays the artists during a year of extreme highs and lows.
An advocate for health care reform, Jaouad served on Barack Obama’s Presidential Cancer Panel and received the Inspire Award from the National Marrow Donor Program (Be the Match) for her work to expand and diversify the national bone marrow registry.
A citizen of Tunisia, Switzerland and the United States, Jaouad attended the Juilliard School’s pre-college program for the double bass. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and an MFA from Bennington College.
William Kentridge
Doctor of Fine Arts
Artist
William Kentridge is a leading South African artist whose works have been exhibited globally. Working across drawing, writing and film, Kentridge grounds his creations in politics, science, literature and history. He is renowned for his original works for the stage, which combine performance, projections, voice and music.
Since the 1990s, Kentridge’s art has been exhibited at major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
He has directed Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” Shostakovich’s “The Nose” and Alban Berg’s operas “Lulu” and “Wozzeck” at venues including the Metropolitan Opera in New York, La Scala in Milan, the English National Opera in London and the Salzburg Festival. In 2023, he received an Olivier Award for outstanding achievement in opera for “Sibyl” in London.
Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, where in 2016 he co-founded the Centre for the Less Good Idea, an incubator for experimental performance. In 2024, he was an artist-in-residence at the Brown Arts Institute as part of a series to commemorate the inaugural year of Brown’s Lindemann Performing Arts Center.
Timothy Snyder
Doctor of Letters
Historian
Timothy Snyder is a leading historian on Ukraine, Central Europe, the Soviet Union and the Holocaust who earned his bachelor’s degree in history and political science from Brown University in 1991.
An influential scholar and writer on authoritarianism, politics and health, Snyder offers insightful commentaries and in-depth historical analyses that have inspired artistic expressions ranging from film to rock opera. He has authored or edited 20 books that have been published in 40 languages. Those include “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century,” “The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America,” and “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” for which he won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award.
A professor of history at Yale University, Snyder holds the inaugural chair in modern European history at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
Among many recognitions, he has received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding, and Guggenheim and Carnegie fellowships. He is a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and head of the academic advisory council of the Ukrainian History Global Initiative.
Snyder, who speaks five languages and reads 10 European languages, earned a Ph.D. from Oxford in addition to his degree from Brown.
Kevin Young
Doctor of Letters
Award-winning poet
Kevin Young is an acclaimed poet, essayist, poetry editor and curator who earned his master of fine arts in creative writing from Brown University in 1996.
A prolific poet who has authored 15 books of poetry and prose and edited 11 volumes, Young is the poetry editor at the New Yorker. Among many recognitions for his books of poetry, “Stones” was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, “Book of Hours” won the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and “Jelly Roll: a blues” won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a National Book Award finalist.
Young served as director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture from 2021 to 2025, prior to which he directed the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. From 2005 to 2016, he was Candler professor and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.
A recipient of Guggenheim, Stegner and MacDowell fellowships, Young was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016 and was named a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020.
Young received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University before earning an MFA from Brown.