John Maltese

Maltese’s books include The Selling of Supreme Court Nominees (winner of the “C. Herman Pritchett Award” from the Law & Courts Section of the American Political Science Association), Spin Control: The White House Office of Communications and the Management of Presidential News, The Politics of the Presidency (co-authored with Joseph A. Pika) which is currently in its 8th edition, and Government Matters: American Democracy in Context (co-authored with Joseph A. Pika and W. Philips Shively). He is a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor (the University of Georgia’s highest teaching honor) and was named the 2004 Georgia Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). He has served as a Senior Teaching Fellow and is a member of the UGA Teaching Academy. He is the founding director of the SPIA at Oxford Study Abroad Program and was named the OIE Study Abroad Director of the Year in 2003. He has written editorials for the Washington Post and Atlanta Journal-Constitution and has been widely quoted and cited in the national and international media, from CNN.com and the Wall Street Journal to the New Yorker and La Stampa. He has been interviewed on C-SPAN, Fox News, and National Public Radio, and was an on-screen commentator for the French documentary film, Le storytelling ou l’art de raconter les histoires, which traces how narrative techniques have changed political communication. In 2007, he directed a 3-day conference at the University of Georgia on the presidency of Jimmy Carter that aired live on C-SPAN and won the CASE District III Award for Institutional Events.

In his spare time, Maltese writes about classical music and, with his father, is the official biographer of the violinist Jascha Heifetz. Both he and his father won a Grammy Award in 1996 from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for liner notes that they co-authored for the 65-CD BMG Classics set, The Heifetz Collection, and they have also co-authored liner notes for Deutsche Grammophon and Sony, and co-produced a CD set, The Dawn of Recording, comprised of homemade cylinder recordings from the 1890s that they discovered in Russia (including the voices of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky and performances by leading 19th-century musicians who made no other known recordings). The set was named the “Recording of the Month” by CD Review in March 2009 and garnered major stories in such outlets as the New York Times and NPR’s “All Things Considered.”  Maltese is an on-screen commentator in the documentary film God’s Fiddler, directed by the Emmy Award-winning Peter Rosen, which received its regional premiere at UGA’s Hodgson Hall in 2011 as part of a “Heifetz Celebration” that Maltese organized with the support of the President’s Venture Fund and other units on campus. Material from his extensive collection of musical autographs and manuscripts formed the basis of an exhibit at the UGA Museum of Art in 2006 and at the Hollywood Bowl Museum in 2001.