Earlier this month, Georgetown University announced the appointment of a new dean of Georgetown College, the university’s oldest undergraduate school. Christopher Celenza, 49, vice provost for faculty affairs at Johns Hopkins University, will take up the post July 1. He succeeds Dean Chester Gillis, a theology faculty member.
Celenza holds a dual appointment at Hopkins in classics, as Charles Homer Haskins Professor, and in German and Romance languages. A specialist in the Italian Renaissance, he will publish a book on the 14th-century poet Petrarch this year.
In a statement, Celenza said: “Since my research focuses on the Renaissance, what better institution to belong to than Georgetown, a product of the Society of Jesus founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola in the 16th century?”
A Staten Islander, Celenza earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from the State University of New York. He has a doctoral degree in history from Duke University and another in classics from the University of Hamburg. From 1996 to 2004, he taught in the history department at Michigan State University.
Founding director of JHU’s Charles Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe from 2008 to 2010, Celenza then took a leave of absence to serve as director of the American Academy in Rome. Before becoming vice provost, he was vice dean of humanities and social sciences at Hopkins, in which position he implemented several new majors and helped diversify the faculty.
Celenza’s wife Anna is the Thomas E. Caestecker Professor of Music in Georgetown’s department of performing arts.
