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John Peter Portelli | |
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| Born | 21 March 1954 Mosta, Malta |
| Alma mater | McGill University |
| Occupation(s) | Professor and author |
| Employer | University of Toronto |
| Website | https://www.johnpportelli.com |
John Peter Portelli (born 1954) is a professor emeritus, poet and fiction writer from Malta who resides in Toronto, Canada, and Malta. [1]
John P. Portelli was born in Malta where, after completing a B.A. (Philosophy & Maltese, 1975), and a B.A. (hons. in Philosophy, 1976) he taught history and modern languages at a secondary school and philosophy at a sixth form. In 1977 he was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship and commenced his studies at McGill University from where he obtained an M.A. (1979) and a Ph.D. (1984) in Philosophy. Currently he is a professor emeritus in the Department of Social Justice Education, and the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education at OISE, University of Toronto. He is a member of the Centre for Leadership and Diversity and a fellow a St. Michael's College, University of Toronto.
Before joining OISE in 1999 as a full professor he taught in several universities: The University of Malta (1980), College Marie Victorin (1981-1985), McGill University (1982-1985), Dalhousie University (Killam Post-Doctoral Fellow, 1985-1986), Mount Saint Vincent University (1986 – 1999). He was a visiting professor at the University of Malta (1992), Acadia University (1997), the University of British Columbia (1998), and the University of Verona (2010, 2011).
He has published 27 books including eight collections of poetry, two collections of short stories and a novel, and over 100 articles and chapters in books. He has also made over 100 presentations at national and international conferences. Two of his books won the American Educational Studies Association Critic Award, and another of his books won the Canadian Association for the Foundations of Education Book Award.
His research includes theoretical and empirical studies. He has led several national research projects in Canada and elsewhere. In total he has been awarded $1.4 million for research projects.
In 2005 he received the Canadian Society for the Study of Education Mentorship Award. In March 2013 he was awarded the David E. Hunt Graduate Teaching Award at the University of Toronto.
Since 1982 he has worked closely with teachers and school administrators in Canada and internationally. He has been a member of the Board of the National Commission for Higher Education of Malta (2006-2017) and Chair of the Board in 2022, a Lead Expert for the European Mediterranean University, Slovenia (on issues of quality assurance), Chair of the Quality Assurance Committee for Further and Higher Education in Malta (2014-2018) and a regular member of the same Committee(until 2022), and a senior policy advisor to the Ministry of Education and Employment in Malta (2007-2022). He has carried out Quality Assurance work in several countries including Malta, Slovenia, Turkey, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
Although Portelli started writing in his youth and published poetry and essays in literary journals in Malta, his first collection of poetry was published in 2001: Bejn Żewġ Dinjiet/In Between (Toronto). Since then he has published several collections both in Maltese and bilingual collections. He also published a novela, Everyone but Faiza, and two collections of short stories. His writing has been described as being critical realist and minimalist in style. His work focuses on themes of social justice, migration, and existential every day occurrences. His latest poetry publications include: Here Was (2023), Vojta l-Bajja/Barren is the Bay (2023), The Shadow: Poems for the Children of Palestine (co-authored with Ahmed Miqdad), 2024; Meta Tasal, Tasal (a collection of poems in Maltese), 2024, and an edited collection Unsilenced: Poems for Palestine (50 international contributors), 2025.
His work has been translated and published in Italian, Romanian, Arabic, Greek, Persian, Polish, Ukrainian, Spanish, Korean, and French.
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