Laura DeSisto

At Johns Hopkins, Laura DeSisto is the Program Director and a senior lecturer for the Master of Liberal Arts program.

Most recently, she was the Regis College associate dean of academic programs at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. Prior to joining Regis, she was an assistant professor of social and philosophical foundations of education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and a postdoctoral fellow in the Education Department at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.

DeSisto’s scholarly interests include questions concerning the human condition, especially those raised by existential philosophy; the role aesthetic experiences play in the process of understanding and meaning-making; critical social justice theory in teacher education; and the importance of the liberal arts in higher education.

DeSisto graduated summa cum laude from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, with a double major in philosophy and Italian studies, and completed an MPhil and PhD at Columbia University in the field of philosophy and education. Her dissertation, “Education and the Human Condition: Reconceptualizing the Activities of Teaching and Learning” (2007), uses existential philosophy to reveal how we continuously share, cultivate, struggle with, and perpetuate our conceptions of humanity through the practices of teaching and learning.

Featured Works

• “Humanism and Education,” a chapter in A History of Western Philosophy of Education in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by Kevin Gary, 121-144, Vol. 2 of A History of Western Philosophy of Education, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021