Academic profile

Prof. Dr. John Baldacchino is Full Professor of Art and Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he teaches in the departments of Art and Educational Policy Studies (EPS). He served as Director of the Division of the Arts (Arts Institute) between 2016 and 2019. Prior to UW-Madison he was Professorial Chair of Arts Education at the University of Dundee in Scotland. He served as Associate Dean & Full Professor of Arts Pedagogy at the Graduate School, Falmouth University, England; as Associate Professor of Art and Art Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York; Reader (Associate Prof.) in Critical Theory & Contextual Studies at Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University, Scotland; and Lecturer (Assistant Prof.) of Arts Education and Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick, England.

John Baldacchino speaking at a conference in Portugal: Formative aesthetics and the contradiction of teaching / Estética formativa e contradição do ensino
John Baldacchino and Nick Mirzoeff, interviewing Jacques Ranciere during the 2nd Annual Seminar: Jacques Ranciere at Teachers College Columbia University, New York City, April 22, 2008.

As an academic

Baldacchino specializes in art, philosophy, and education. His work is contextualised in the philosophies of art and of education, with special focus on the political and cultural underpinning of these fields. A further dimension to his work is that of the Mediterranean, which features in several books and papers that he has written, as well as the themes that inspire his art work.

The interdisciplinary character of Baldacchino’s work is characterized by (a) his engagement with society as the onus of a politics of aesthetics which is in turn formative and radically democratic; (b) doing research as a generative activity that reflects the criticality of studio practice; and (c) enhancing democracy as a creative state of affairs that emerges from the ever-changing horizon of a pragmatic understanding of change and constant reform.

Baldacchino has comprehensive experience of teaching in British and American systems of education spanning across primary, secondary and tertiary levels. He sustains a continuous interest in the philosophies of art and of education, while keeping abreast with the various changes and challenges that continue to characterise learning as a polity that is transformed into a space of arguing and doing. His teaching and research interests converge on society, the school, and the polity through a concern for philosophy and the creative arts, their ethical-formative roles within and beyond the school; pedagogy, innovation and creativity; educational politics and their cultural condition.

Baldacchino’s research and teaching philosophy is characterised by:

  • Continuously enhancing and reaffirming a mutual relationship between practice and discourse, teaching and research.
  • A strong commitment to develop research within a fuller dimension that attends to strengthening the ethical, epistemological and aesthetic character of scholarship.
  • A commitment to democracy and social justice, where the arts, philosophy and education reaffirm themselves with the wider projects of equity, diversity and social justice.
  • Reaffirming the arts, philosophy and education over a horizon that is neither exclusive of, nor marginal to, empirical and applied research.
John Baldacchino teaching at UW Wisconsin

As an artist

Baldacchino considers his engagement with the visual arts as having three avenues: studio practice, theoretical research and teaching. In his studio practice he mainly works in two-dimensional media, although in his artistic education he specialized in both painting and sculpture. His studio interests extend to publishing, typography, and graphic design. His graphic art covers web-design, illustration, layout and cover design. As a graphic designer he designed and illustrated a series of Italian textbooks, children’s Italian readers, and cover-design and layout- and page-setting of several academic books. He also contributed as a free-lance political cartoonist in weekly and monthly newspapers and magazines. He exhibited in solo and collective shows in the UK, Europe, the US and Asia and he mostly works in two-dimensional (mixed) media.

John Baldacchino and Maxine Greene speaking sitting beside one another

As an author

Baldacchino is the author of numerous books, essays, refereed and journalistic articles in academic and political journals. 

Between 1983 and 1990 he regularly published journalistic articles and critical essays in political journals and newspapers language and was also a graphic artist and political cartoonist, contributing work on a weekly basis. 

More recently he has resumed writing on civil issues and political reform, though his focus remains on academic writing.

  • The Bloomsbury Handbook of Continental Philosophy (with Herner Saeverot, Bloomsbury 2024)   
  • Lessons of Belonging. Art, Place and the Sea (Brill 2023)
  • Sejjieħ il-Ħsieb: Limitu u Ħelsien [Rubbleworks of Thought. Limit and Liberty] (Klabb Kotba Maltin, 2020)
  • Educing Ivan Illich: Reform, Contingency and Disestablishment (Peter Lang, 2020)
  • International Encyclopaedia of Art & Design Education. Volume 1: Histories and Philosophies. (Wiley & Son 2019)
  • Art as Unlearning: Towards a mannerist pedagogy. (Routledge 2018)
  • My Teaching, My Philosophy: Kenneth Wain and the Lifelong Engagement with Education (with Simone Galea and Duncan Mercieca, Peter Lang 2014)
  • John Dewey: Liberty and the Pedagogy of Disposition (Springer 2014)
  • Democracy Without Confession: Philosophical Conversations on the Maltese Political Imaginary (with Kenneth Wain, Allied 2013)
  • Mediterranean Art and Education: Navigating Local, Regional and Global Imaginaries Through the Lens of the Arts and Learning (with Raphael Vella, Sense 2013)
  • Art’s Way Out: Exit Pedagogy and the Cultural Condition (Sense 2012)
  • Makings of the Sea: Journey, Doubt and Nostalgia (Gorgias 2010)
  • Education Beyond Education: Self and the Imaginary in Maxine Greene’s philosophy (Peter Lang, 2009)
  • Avant-Nostalgia: An excuse to pause (with Jeremy Diggle, 2002)
  • Easels of Utopia: Art’s Fact Retuned (Ashgate 1998; Routledge 2018)
  • Post-Marxist Marxism: Questioning the Answer (Avebury 1996; Routledge 2018)
View full list of books and endorsements

Scholarly interests

Philosophy:  aesthetics | philosophy of education | political philosophy | critical theory | the politics of aesthetics | Mediterranean aesthetics.

Education: philosophy of education | pedagogical aesthetics | the politics of education | critical theory and education | the art school in the 21st century | unlearning as a mannerist pedagogy | weak pedagogy | indirect pedagogy | the future of the arts in the university sector.

Art: philosophies and theories of art | studio practice with an emphasis on painting | arts-based methodologies | contextual critical theory | Mediterranean art. 

Qualifications

Ph.D. University of Warwick, England, UK
(1991- 1994) | Areas of Research: Aesthetics, Critical Theory, Political Philosophy, Modernism, Contemporary Art and Music

M.A. University of Warwick, England, UK
(1993) | Areas of Research: Aesthetics, Critical Theory, Mediterranean studies, Modernism, contemporary and inter-cultural music; theory of culture

B.Ed. (Hons.) University of Malta, Malta
(1984-1989) | Specialism: History of Art, Visual Arts (studio), Arts Education, Early & Middle Years (Primary teaching)

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