Celso Villegas, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of Sociology
Kenyon’s Board of Trustees considered the recommendations of the Tenure and Promotion Committee at its October meeting, where it approved promoting NEH Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of Sociology Celso Villegas to full professor effective July 1, 2026.
The title of full professor represents the highest rank the College confers. It rests upon demonstrated excellence in teaching, scholarly or artistic engagement, and citizenship sustained over a substantial period of time and the achievement of recognition both within the College and the profession as a whole.
Celso Villegas
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of Sociology
Celso Villegas, who came to Kenyon in 2011 as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in International Studies, is trained in comparative-historical analysis. He’s published on middle-class formation and democracy in the Philippines, Ecuador and Venezuela. His current research expands on the theme of democratic change through the lens of cultural sociology: the meanings of social class, ritual and political performance in U.S. politics, and civil sphere theory around the world. He has served the American Journal of Cultural Sociology as book reviews and associate editor since 2022.
Villegas’s project as part of the NEH professorship is focused on how to provide intellectual resources to students and others on how to read each other faithfully instead of suspiciously and to find joy and surprise in the social world.
He teaches courses on a variety of topics in both sociology and international studies: sociological theory, economic sociology, cultural sociology, collective memory, comparative democratization and civil society.
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Doctor of Philosophy in sociology from Brown University (2012)
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Master of Arts in sociology from Brown University (2005)
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Bachelor of Arts in sociology from Connecticut College (2003)