Former United Nations ambassador Thomas R. Pickering will be the 2015 Commencement keynote speaker, according to a press release issued by the University on Monday. 

The honorary degree recipients will be ballerina and founder of the Suzanne Farrell Ballet Suzanne Farrell, writer Jamaica Kincaid, chef and restauranteur Yotam Ottolenghi and poet and literary critic Helen Vendler.

Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Bill Schaller wrote in the press release that “In honoring Ambassador Pickering…Brandeis highlights the value of working together for the betterment of mankind.” This will be the first commencement since at least 1972 at which more honorary degrees will be awarded to women than men, according to a March 10, 2014 letter from the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program. Last year’s commencement ceremony met national scrutiny after women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali was disinvited from receiving an honorary degree at the ceremony, after students and professors condemned several of Hirsi Ali’s past statements as prejudiced against Islam. 

Pickering received the Department of State’s Distinguished Service Award in 1996, and holds the title of Career Ambassador—the highest title in U.S. Foreign Service. His career has included ambassadorships in Jordan, Nigeria, El Salvador, Israel, Russia and India. During his time in El Salvador, Pickering was the subject of at least three assassination attempts, according to the Los Angeles Times. 

From 1989 to 1992, he was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President George H.W. Bush, during which time he helped to lead the Security Council’s response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, according to the website of the Global Leadership Foundation, of which Pickering is a member. Bush’s decision to move Pickering from the U.N. to the position of U.S. ambassador to India three years later was met with backlash: New York Times columnist Leslie Gelb called Pickering “arguably the best-ever senior U.S. representative to that body, [the U.N.]” and theorized that Pickering was being moved because Secretary of State James Baker “felt the career diplomat [Pickering] is casting too big a shadow on the Baker parade.” 

Pickering later served as under secretary of state to President Bill Clinton from 1997 until his retirement from diplomacy in 2001. Upon his appointment as under secretary, Time magazine hailed Pickering as a “five star general of the diplomatic corps.” 

Pickering was co-chairman of the State Department’s review of the 2012 attacks on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, but was criticized by conservatives for his decision not to interview Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and for his report’s mild criticisms of the State Department.

Suzanne Farrell is the founder of the Suzanne Farrell Ballet at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and performed in over 100 ballets over her 28-year-long career, according to the Kennedy Center website. Nearly a third of these roles were specifically written for her by influential choreographers, including Jerome Robbins and Maurice Béjart. Most notably, Farrell worked closely with George Balanchine, a prolific choreographer and co-founder of the School of American Ballet. Farrell was cast as the lead in Diamonds, the third section of Balanchine’s Jewels, and his later ballets Chaconne and Mozartiana were written specifically for Farrell. She is currently a répétiteur for The George Balanchine Trust, which oversees Balanchine’s works. The Suzanne Farrell Ballet has a repertoire of over 65 works, and has been noted in the Washington Post as being “among Washington’s cultural highlights.” 

Jamaica Kincaid is a widely celebrated writer of novels and short stories, whose works include the short story and prose poem collection At the Bottom of the River, the novels Lucy, Annie John and The Autobiography of My Mother and the memoir My Brother. Her short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Rolling Stone and the Paris Review, according to the website for the Ansfield-Wolf Book Award, which Kincaid won in 1997 for The Autobiography of My Mother. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. Kincaid’s works explores themes including colonialism, mother-daughter relationships, gender and sexuality, racism, class and imperialism. Her writing is largely interpreted as semi-autobiographical and reflective of her experiences growing up in St. John’s, Antigua. She is a professor at Harvard University.  

Yotam Ottolenghi is the owner of five restaurants and delis in London, and writes a cooking column for the Guardian. Born in Jerusalem, The Independent newspaper describes his style as “marrying the food of his native Israel with a wider range of incredible textures and flavours from the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Asia.” Ottolenghi has published four cookbooks, including Ottolenghi, Plenty  and Jerusalem, which were each New York Times bestsellers. He was a sub-editor on the news desk of Haaretz. His business partner, Sami Tamimi, is Palestinian and was also raised in Jerusalem, and is the co-author of the cookbook Jerusalem. A New Yorker article quotes Ottolenghi as saying, “It takes a giant leap of faith, but we are happy to take it—what have we got to lose?—to imagine that hummus will eventually bring Jerusalemites together, if nothing else will.”

Helen Vendler is a professor of poetry at Harvard and an esteemed poetry critic. A 2006 New York Times article credits her for helping to “establish or secure the reputations of Jorie Graham, Seamus Heaney and Rita Dove, among many others.” The same article quotes literary scholar Harold Bloom as saying of Vendler, “I think there isn’t anyone in the country who can read syntax in poems as well as she can.” After earning her bachelor of arts degree in chemistry at Emmanuel College and a Fulbright fellowship in mathematics, Vendler earned a doctorate in English and American literature from Harvard in 1960, and was the first woman to be offered an instructorship at Harvard’s English department in 1959. She later accepted a professorship in 1981 after writing several books. She is Harvard’s A. Kingsley Porter university professor. 

The University’s 2015 commencement ceremony will take place on Sunday, May 17.