Timothy Rommen Appointed Vice Provost for the Arts

Timothy Rommen, Davidson Kennedy Professor and Professor of Music and Africana Studies, has been named the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural Vice Provost for the Arts, effective Jan. 1, 2025.

“Tim Rommen is the ideal colleague to serve as Penn’s first vice provost for the arts,” says Provost John L. Jackson Jr., in making the announcement. “He is widely respected as a collaborative and consultative leader who is strongly committed to scholarship and teaching, to our diverse arts communities on campus and in Philadelphia, and to the goals of In Principle and Practice.” Jackson also pointed to Rommen’s breadth of experience, insights, and vision, calling them “invaluable assets” in helping shape the future of the arts at the University.

“The arts afford us spaces to engage with the pressing issues of our time—be it climate change, social justice, or the growing impact of AI—and they do so through expressive practices and methods that often directly challenge us to rethink, reimagine, and reframe our understanding of the issues at hand,” Rommen says. “I am excited to partner with our arts leaders and practitioners, and with the wider Philadelphia arts community, to maximize the impact of their innovative, cross-disciplinary, and experimental work and to imagine new possibilities for the arts here at Penn and beyond.”

Since 2002, Rommen has been a professor in the School of Arts & Sciences. 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), which won the Alan Merriam Prize for the best book of the year in ethnomusicology. In 2023, Rommen received the Ira H. Abrams Award for Distinguished Teaching, Penn Arts & Sciences’ highest teaching award.

He 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. Rommen is a board member of Penn’s Center for Africana Studies, Greenfield Intercultural Center, Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, and Wolf Humanities Center, among others. He is also a member of University committees including the Provost’s Arts Advisory Council, Faculty Senate Subcommittee on Research, University Council Committees on Diversity and Equity and Academic and Related Affairs, the School of Arts & Sciences Committee on Undergraduate Education, and the College of Arts & Sciences Cultural Diversity in the U.S. Curriculum Committee.

Visit https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/timothy-rommen-appointed-vice-provost-arts-penn for the full announcement.