The Department of Music congratulates Timothy Rommen, Davidson Kennedy Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of music and Africana studies, for his appointment as vice provost for the arts at Penn, effective January 1, 2025.
Timothy Rommen (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2002) specializes in the music of the Caribbean with research interests that include popular music, sacred music, critical theory, ethics, tourism, diaspora, and the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. His first book, entitled "Mek Some Noise": Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad (University of California Press, 2007), was awarded the Alan P. Merriam Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2008. His is also the author of “Funky Nassau”: Roots, Routes, and Representation in Bahamian Popular Music (University of California Press, 2011). He is contributing author to and co-editor, along with Daniel Neely, of Sun, Sea, and Sound: Music and Tourism in the Circum-Caribbean(Oxford University Press, 2014). He is also contributing author and co-editor, with Jocelyne Guilbault, of Sounds of Vacation: Political Economies of Caribbean Tourism (Duke University Press, 2019).
Along with his research and teaching, Tim has served as faculty chair, director of graduate studies, and director of undergraduate studies within the department. Provost John L. Jackson Jr. says “Tim Rommen is the ideal colleague to serve as Penn’s first vice provost for the arts. 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, the University’s strategic framework, which he played a key role in developing as a member of the Red and Blue Advisory Committee.”