Don Michael Randel

Don M. Randel served as Chair of the Board of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 2013 to 2017. From 2006 to 2013, he was President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He served as President of the University of Chicago from 2000 to 2006. Prior to that he was a faculty member in the department of music at Cornell University for thirty-two years. During that time, he served as Department Chair, Vice Provost, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Provost. His scholarly interests include medieval liturgical chant, especially in Spain, medieval Arabic music theory, secular polyphony in France and Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Latin American popular music, and the songs of Robert Schumann and Cole Porter. He is the editor of The Harvard Dictionary of Music, The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, and The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians and has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society. He is a member of the Board of Carnegie Hall, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and CNA Financial. He has also served on the boards of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Argonne National Laboratory, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and Rockefeller University. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.