Joseph H. Auner, Ph.D.
Provost and Senior Vice President
Joseph H. Auner, Austin Fletcher Professor of Music
Appointed Provost and Senior Vice President ad interim on July 1, 2026
As Provost and Senior Vice President ad interim, Professor Auner serves as Tufts University's chief academic officer and is responsible for setting and advancing institutional priorities that support the university's mission as a student-centered R1 institution. In this role, he oversees Tufts' schools and colleges, as well as a range of cross-school programs and initiatives. He champions academic excellence across the university's educational, research, and civic engagement missions while fostering the success of students, faculty, and staff in alignment with the Tufts Beyond 175 Strategic Plan. Through strategic leadership, collaboration, and coordination, his office strengthens the university's academic enterprise and advances innovation, impact, and institutional effectiveness. His portfolio encompasses educational strategy and program excellence, the strategic direction of the research enterprise, student experience and support, faculty affairs, faculty development and mentorship, and the advancement of inclusive excellence across the university community. He also serves as the senior officer supporting the Board of Trustees' Academic Affairs Committee and Student Affairs Subcommittee.
A member of the Tufts faculty since 2006, Professor Auner served as Dean of Academic Affairs for the School of Arts and Sciences from 2016 to 2019, with a broad portfolio of departments in STEM, art, languages, and the social sciences, and as the founding Dean of University College from 2018 to 2023. He has served three terms as chair of the Department of Music in the School of Arts and Sciences, and has participated on several university-wide committees, including Budget and Priorities, Campus Planning and Development, Faculty Review Board, and the advisory board for Science, Technology, and Society. Prior to Tufts, he served as Associate Provost at Stony Brook University, where he created the Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Science Initiative, launched the university’s Winter Session, and oversaw academic reviews across all schools, along with its branch campus in Manhattan.
Earning his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Professor Auner is a musicologist whose research and teaching focuses on 20th- and 21st-century music, fin-de-siècle Vienna and Weimar Berlin, music technology, and sound studies. He is the author of the widely adopted Norton textbook Music in the 20th and 21st Centuries, A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life (Yale University Press) and the Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg, which he co-edited with his student Jennifer Shaw. His recent articles have engaged with the implications of AI for archival research, the function of feedback in Noise music, cybernetics and the idea of the posthuman, and ways in which music and sound technologies have opened up new conceptions of time, the creative process, and ideas of historical performance practice in wide range of classical and popular genres.
Professor Auner has taught courses for undergraduate and graduate students, including “Sound and Sonic Imagination,” “Music, Art, and Culture in Paris and Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century,’ and “Music, Technology, and Digital Culture.” He has supervised numerous MA theses at Tufts and more than a dozen Ph.D. dissertations at Stony Brook University.
Along with organizing several international conferences, Professor Auner has lectured at leading institutions across Europe, Asia, and North America, and most recently held the honor of Schönberg Professor at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musical Society, and also served as Vice President of the American Musicological Society. Professor Auner is the recipient of the Tufts Distinguished Scholar Award, an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, The Colorado College, and fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung and the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities.