About Pamela Fox

Pamela Fox, President of Mary Baldwin College, was born in Texas and reared in central Ohio. Fox started playing the piano at age 5. She went on to earn three degrees from the University of Cincinnati’s college Conservatory of Music (B.M., M.M., and Ph.D. in musicology). She also studied in Germany.

Prior to assuming the presidency of Mary Baldwin in July 2003, Dr. Fox spent 20 years at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She joined the faculty as assistant professor of musicology and served as Associate Dean of the School of Fine Arts, Chair of the Department of Music, and most recently as Dean of the School of Fine Arts. Under Dr. Fox’s leadership, the School’s endowments and grants rose dramatically, and a $30-million center for the arts was planned. One of Dr. Fox’s goals was to involve Miami’s 16,000 students in the arts. She taught and designed a course, “Experiencing the Arts,” taken by hundreds of students each year. An “Arts for All” program doubled student attendance at events.

Dr. Fox also played a key role in Miami’s efforts to maintain and enhance its position as one of the top universities in the country. She served as the provost’s special assistant for strategic planning and as chair of a university-wide council developing ambitious goals to mark Miami’s bicentennial in 2009. In 2002, Dr. Fox was named assistant vice president of planning for Miami.

An active scholar and honored instructor, Dr. Fox has written widely about her research—on 18th-century composer Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, a son of Johann Sebastian Bach, and on music in Boston at the turn of the last century. She has presented scholarly papers throughout this country and abroad. After studying the evolution of C. P. E. Bach’s handwriting and the physical structure of his manuscripts, she re-dated more than a quarter of his compositions and posed a new interpretation of his stylistic development. Her book, Sonatas from Manuscript Sources, is being published this year by the Packard Humanities Institute in collaboration with the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig and Harvard University. Through a second book, Cultural Counterpoint: Musical Life in Boston 1890-1920, Dr. Fox is recreating through oral histories and documents, a period when music “in tenements, Symphony Hall, and vaudeville”—written and performed by different ethnic groups and class origins—“resonated harmoniously.”

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