Michael A. Peters is
Professor of Education at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, Professor
Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Adjunct
Professor in the School of Art, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT)
and The Department of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University. He was Excellence
Professor at the University of Illinois (2005-2011), held a personal chair at
the University of Auckland (2000-2005) where he was also Head of Cultural and
Policy Studies, and was Research Professor at the University of Glasgow
(2000-2005). He is the executive editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory
(Wiley-Blackwell), graded as an A+ in the banding study by the Australian
government, and edits two online journals, Policy Futures in Education and
E-Learning and Digital Media (Symposium) of which he is the founding editor. He
has a strong interest in the field of higher education policy and published two
books on universities in New Zealand as well as recently co-authoring with
Simon Marginson and Peter Murphy the trilogy, Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy (2009) Global Creation:
Space, Connection and Universities in the Age of the Knowledge Economy
(2010), Imagination: Three Models of Imagination in the Age of the Knowledge
Economy (2010) (AESA
Critics Book Award 2010). His interests are broadly in educational
theory and the connections between education, philosophy, politics and policy.
He has written over sixty books, including most recently The Last Book of Postmodernism (2011), The Virtues of Openness: Education, Science and Scholarship in the
Digital Age, with Peter Roberts (2011), and Neoliberalism and After? Social Policy and the Crisis of Western
Capitalism (2011) which won the American Educational Studies Association
Critics’ Book Award for 2011, an award he has won now four times. He has a
strong research interests in distributed knowledge systems, digital scholarship
and elearning systems and has acted as an advisor to government on these and
related matters in Scotland, NZ, South Africa and the EU. He was elected a
lifelong fellow by the New Zealand Academy of Humanities in 2008, Honorary
Fellow of the Royal Society of NZ in 2010 and awarded an honorary Doctor of
Letters for his work on openness by Empire State College, SUNY in 2012.
