Description/Abstract: Join us for a stimulating discussion with Dr. John Badacchino, Maltese-born author of Makings of the Sea: Journey, Doubt, and Nostalgia (Gorgias Press, 2010). This book is the first volume in a new series on Mediterranean Aesthetics in which he urges the reader to follow the light of Albert Camus and explore geopolitical aesthetics and imagination, with the sea as a metaphor. It also launches a new book series, Mediterranea, which Dr. Baldacchino is editing with his colleague Dr. John Chircop, from the University of Malta. In Makings of the Sea Dr. Baldacchino invites the reader to consider how “aesthetics inhabit and define the Mediterranean as a common cultural horizon founded on difference,” as he travels the spectrum of visual and performing arts, literature and music.

John Baldacchino is Associate Professor of Art Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He was also member of Faculty at Gray’s School of Art in Scotland and at the University of Warwick in England. He writes on the visual arts, aesthetics, critical and cultural theory, philosophy of art and education and political theory. His publications include Post-Marxist Marxism: Questioning the Answer (1996), Easels of Utopia: Art’s Fact Returned (1998), Avant-Nostalgia: An Excuse to Pause (2002), Education Beyond Education: Self and the Imaginary in Maxine Greene’s Philosophy (2008) and Art’s Way Out (forthcoming).