Timothy Rommen

Timothy Rommen, Martin Meyerson Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of Music and Africana Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences, began his tenure as Penn’s inaugural Vice Provost for the Arts on January 1, 2025.

A renowned expert in the music of the Caribbean, he is the author of Funky Nassau: Roots, Routes, and Representation in Bahamian Popular Music (University of California Press, 2011) and “Mek Some Noise:” Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad (University of California Press, 2007), winner of the Alan Merriam Prize for the best book of the year in ethnomusicology, in addition to six edited volumes and dozens of articles and book chapters. He is co-editor of the Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology book series (University of Chicago Press), editor of and contributing author to Excursions in World Music (Routledge), and a contributor to the Cambridge History of World Music, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016 for his ongoing work, Sounding a Borderless Caribbean: The Creole Geographies of Dominican Popular Music, currently under contract to the University of Chicago Press. His research interests include popular music, sacred music, critical theory, ethics, tourism, diaspora, and the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. 

At Penn, Vice Provost Rommen has served as Chair, Director of Graduate Studies, and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Music, as well as Interim Chair of the Department of Africana Studies; a board member of the Center for Africana Studies, Greenfield Intercultural Center, Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, and Wolf Humanities Center, among others; and a member of university committees including the Provost’s Arts Advisory Council, Faculty Senate Subcommittee on Research, SAS Committee on Undergraduate Education, and CAS Cultural Diversity in the US Curriculum Committee. In 2023, he received the Ira H. Abrams Award for Distinguished Teaching, the highest teaching award in the School of Arts and Sciences. He earned a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago, an MM in Musicology from Northwestern University, and a BA in Music Performance/Theory from Trinity International University.