Ferrari Humanities Symposia

Professor Christopher S. Celenza

Professor Christopher S. Celenza is the Dean of Georgetown College at Georgetown University, where he is also a professor of history and classics. He came to the Hilltop from Johns Hopkins University, where he most recently served as Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and held the Charles Homer Haskins Professorship in classics.

ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP

Celenza holds two doctoral degrees: a Ph.D. in history (Duke University, 1995) and a Dr.phil in Classics and Neo-Latin Literature (University of Hamburg, 2001). He has held Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the ACLS, Villa I Tatti, the American Academy in Rome, and the Fulbright Foundation. He served as the 21st Director of the American Academy in Rome from 2010 to 2014, and as the Director of JHU’s Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe from 2008 to 2010.

He has a broad range of research and teaching interests, including Italian Renaissance-era philosophy, Latin literature and paleography, and the history of books and reading practices.

RESEARCH AND PUBLICATION

In addition to his academic positions, Celenza is the author or editor of 10 books and more than 40 scholarly articles in the fields of Italian Renaissance history, post-classical Latin literature and philosophy, and the history of classical scholarship. His book The Lost Italian Renaissance was translated into Italian by publisher Carocci in 2014.

His most recent book, Machiavelli: A Portrait, was published by Harvard University Press in Spring 2015. He has two new books forthcoming: Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer (London: Reaktion, forthcoming, October 2017); and The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, spring 2018).