Randy Mason is the chair of historic preservation at the University of Pennsylvania, and is the executive director of PennPraxis. He leads the Center for Research on Preservation and Society, which undertakes applied research projects on site management and on social, economic, and political aspects of historic preservation. Mason's books include The Once and Future New York: Historic Preservation and the Modern City (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States (edited with Max Page; Routledge, 2004). In 2014, he contributed to a series of essays on the impermanent public art project psychylustro.
