Christopher Celenza

Christopher S. Celenza (born 1967) is an American scholar of Renaissance history and the current James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also a professor of history and classics.

Early life and education Celenza was born in 1967 in Cleveland, Ohio. He grew up in Staten Island in New York City, and attended Monsignor Farrell High School, where he graduated in 1985. He received a B.A. and M.A. in history from the State University of New York at Albany in 1988 and 1989, respectively. From 1992 to 1993, Celenza studied in Florence on a Fulbright Scholarship.

In 2001, he received his second doctorate, a Dr. phil. in the classics specializing in Neo-Latin literature, from the University of Hamburg. His Hamburg dissertation was titled, "Piety and Pythagoras in Late Fifteenth Century Florence: The Symbolum Nesianum." Following his degree, Celenza was awarded the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars by the American Council of Learned Societies in 2003.

Academic career While pursuing his doctorate at the University of Hamburg, Celenza became an assistant professor in 1996 While there, he was also the founder of the Charles Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe, of which he served as its first director from 2008 to 2010. In 2008, Celenza was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He held this position until 2014, when he was succeeded by Kimberly Bowes. Following his directorship, Celenza returned to Johns Hopkins, where he became the chair of the department of classics from 2014 to 2016 For a year, he served as vice dean for humanities and social sciences in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. Celenza was subsequently appointed the vice provost for faculty affairs of Johns Hopkins.

On March 2, 2017, the president of Georgetown University, John DeGioia, announced that Celenza would become the Dean of Georgetown College, succeeding Chester Gillis. He officially assumed the position on July 1, 2017. He concurrently held professorships in history and the classics.