Timothy Rommen

Timothy Rommen is the Martin Meyerson Endowed Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies. Rommen has been a professor in the School of Arts & Sciences since 2002, most recently as Davidson Kennedy Professor and Professor of Music and Africana Studies. He was also recently named the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural Vice Provost for the Arts, effective Jan. 1, 2025.

Rommen 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. He is currently engaged in a musical ethnography of Dominica.

The author of Funky Nassau: Roots, Routes, and Representation in Bahamian Popular Music (University of California Press 2011), Rommen also wrote 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.

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. He 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 several 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.