Chapman University has named Dr. Giulio Ongaro as the new dean of the College of Performing Arts, effective August 1, 2015. He replaces Dean Dale A. Merrill who resigned from Chapman at the end of June.

Dr. Ongaro comes to Chapman from the University of the Pacific where he had served as Professor of Music and the Dean of the Conservatory of Music since 2009. A native of Venice, Italy, Dr. Ongaro holds a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a dissertation on the singing chapel of St. Mark’s Basilica (Venice) in the sixteenth century. Professor Ongaro is an active intellectual whose research is centered on questions of the mutual influence of society and the arts, the social and political context for the production and performance of music, the business of music, music printing, musical instruments in the sixteenth century, and the relationship of words and music. His research has been published in scholarly journals in the US and in Europe, and he is the author and co-author of nine articles in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the standard reference work in music.

Before joining the University of the Pacific, he taught music history and musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Delaware, and from 1991 to 2009 at the University of Southern California, where he also served as Chair of the Department of Musicology and later as Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at the Thornton School of Music.

Dean Ongaro shares that he is “very excited to be joining a university that has been one of the great success stories in higher education in the past decades, and … to be given the opportunity to lead the College of Performing Arts at this time. The future opening of the Musco Center for the Arts is a tremendous opportunity for all the students and the faculty of the College, and it will enhance the visibility of the College in the local community and across the country.”

A collaborative and successful leader, Dean Ongaro has expressed his desire “to work with the faculty and staff, and to help them realize their dreams and aspirations, in order to provide our students with the best possible preparation for the real world, while upholding the high artistic standards for which the disciplines in the College are known.”