Victor P. Corona, Ph.D., is a cultural sociologist at West Los Angeles College and an author known for his work on identity, celebrity, and the subcultures of urban nightlife. His background is a unique blend of high-level academia and deep-immersion ethnography. He earned his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, and he has taught at several prestigious institutions, including NYU, Columbia, Hofstra, and the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), as well as Emerson College Los Angeles and Cal State LA.
Primarily examining status hierarchies, his work spans diverse groups ranging from U.S. Army officers to Mexican politicians. He is the author of the Lambda Award-nominated Night Class: A Downtown Memoir (Soft Skull, 2017). Corona’s work is deeply influenced by his own life story; born in Mexico City, he moved to the U.S. as a young child and grew up in the suburbs of New York. He often speaks about how his experience led him to study how identities are constructed and performed. Currently based in Los Angeles, he continues to write about the culture of fame.
Night Class
A Downtown Memoir
"In our elsewhere world of emoji-mediated electronic communication and shared cat videos, Victor Corona reminds us of the power and primal immediacy of real, live night life. There is no better urban guidebook to the alive-and-well social scene that is downtown New York City. If you are nostalgic for Studio 54, Danceteria, CBGB, or even Desperately Seeking Susan, sigh no more: Night Class is the book for you."Dalton Conley, Henry Putnam University Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
"What happens when a khaki-clad academic sociologist goes gaga? Find the answer to that question and many others in Night Class, a wholly original memoir about Victor Corona's transformation from nerd to NYU's celebrated 'professor of nightlife.' It's also an inspired cultural history and a passionate ethnographic exploration of New York nightlife and the very concept of self."Wednesday Martin, author of Primates of Park Avenue
The playground of the rich and the beautiful, downtown New York's nightlife spectacles and power of self-invention incubated pop icons from Andy Warhol to Lady Gaga. Sociologist Victor P. Corona sought a new education, where night classes held in galleries, nightclubs, bars, apartments, stoops, and all-night diners taught him about love, loss, and the living possibilities of identity. Transforming himself from dowdy professor to glitzy clubgoer, Victor immerses himself among downtown's dazzling tribes of artists and performers hungry for fame.
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