Four new A.D. White Professors-at-Large have been appointed recently to enliven Cornell's intellectual and cultural life. They are autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen, poet and essayist Anne Carson, political scientist James C. Scott and economic historian Robert Skidelsky. Their six-year terms run through June 2016.

Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Cambridge, is a highly cited scholar working at the interface of autism, hormones and sex differences. His early "mindblindness" theory posits that people with autism have developmental delays in the ability to empathize. He later theorized that autism is an extreme form of the "male brain," with strong systemizing capabilities and below-average empathy. He is now testing this theory at the neural, endocrine and genetic levels. Baron-Cohen also works on sex differences in mathematical and spatial ability, infant cognition and the role of male hormones in cognitive processing style. He was nominated by Matthew Belmonte, human development.

Carson, professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of Michigan, blends poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation and dramatic dialogue, and frequently references and translates mythology in her work. For example, her 1998 verse novel, "Autobiography of Red," reimagines the mythical monster Geryon as a modern-day, red-winged boy, who has been sexually abused by his older brother and finds comfort in photography and a romance with a young man named Herakles. Since the mid-1990s, she has won a number of prestigious awards, including the Pushcart Prize (1997), the Guggenheim Fellowship (1998), and the MacArthur Fellowship (2000). She was nominated by Kevin Attell, English.

Scott, professor of political science and of anthropology and director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, focuses on the ways in which subordinate people resist domination. Scott's recent publications including "The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia," and his research interests include political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism. Eric Tagiacozzo, history, and Satya Mohanty, English, nominated Scott.

Skidelsky, emeritus professor of political economy at the University of Warwick, England, a director of the Moscow School of Political Studies, and chairman of the Centre for Global Studies, an independent think tank that studies political economy in a globalized world, has received numerous prizes, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations for his three-volume biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes. His account of the current economic crisis, "Keynes: The Return of the Master," was published in 2009.

He was made a member of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom's Parliament in 1991 and elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1994. Skidelsky was nominated by Jonathan Kirshner, government.

There are 17 active professors-at-large. They visit campus at least two times for about a week during their six-year term to conduct public programs and engage in intellectual exchange with faculty and students in classroom, laboratory and informal settings. Past appointees include filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, primatologist Jane Goodall, novelists Toni Morrison and Eudora Welty, poets Octavio Paz and Adrienne Rich, physician Oliver Sacks and actor John Cleese.