Richard Slimbach

At Johns Hopkins, Richard Slimbach is a lecturer for the MS in Organizational Leadership program. His academic interests include global issues, social anthropology, urban sustainability, international development, and qualitative research.

As an author, Slimbach has written Becoming World Wise: A Guide to Global Learning (2010) and The Art of World Learning: Community Engagement for a Sustainable Planet (2020), both of which frame global education as an exercise in artmaking.

Passionate about experiential education, he finds his deepest professional satisfaction in teaching eager minds and designing place-based, experience-driven learning programs aimed at the common good.

Slimbach founded a Global Studies major and co-founded a Master of Arts program focused on field-based global development in informal urban settlements. He also directed a full-immersion study-and-service-away program, enabling students to conduct community research and service-learning projects in more than 50 non-Western countries. His work has taken students to cities such as Port-au-Prince, Kolkata, Medellín, Kampala, and Manila, where they engaged with local families and grassroots organizations to foster cross-cultural understanding and social impact.

Slimbach holds a PhD in International and Comparative Education from UCLA, where his research focused on nonformal educational development among the Baloch people in Karachi, Pakistan.