AAAS Professor Marcyliena Morgan Remembered for Dedication to Truth, Hip-Hop Scholarship

When Marcyliena H. Morgan first began her scholarship on hip-hop in the 1990s, nobody believed the genre would have real staying power, according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., director of the University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

“She saw before anybody that hip-hop was the new lingua franca of American popular culture and that it would be around — as she predicted — for decades,” he said.

“She saw it, and she called it, and she brought it to Harvard,” Gates added.

A professor of African and African American Studies, Morgan was known for pioneering the study of hip-hop as an intellectual endeavor. She died in September due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease. She was 75.

‘A Linguistics Prodigy’

Morgan’s scholarship on hip-hop helped promote the study of the genre at a time when it was not necessarily being taken seriously.

She is best known as the founding director of Harvard’s Hip Hop Archive and Research Institute. Morgan proposed the idea for a hip-hop archive in 1996, though it wasn’t until 2002, when she officially joined Harvard’s faculty, that the archive was launched.

“When we think about what we value, when we really feel as though it’s part of our culture, a part of our history, a part of who we are as a people, we have a tradition, a tendency,” she said in an interview with Harvard Magazine in 2019.

“I think it’s just human to archive that, and to make sure the information is available for other generations and that we recognize it’s something that we value,” Morgan added.

Over the past two decades, the archive has collected and preserved recordings, magazines, interviews, and films relating to the study of hip-hop. It has also hosted initiatives such as the Classic Crates program with the Loeb Music Library, which invited scholars to annotate classic hip-hop records such as Lauryn Hill’s “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” and Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly.”

Novelist and Harvard professor Jamaica Kincaid described Morgan, a longtime close friend, as “a genius when it came to recognising the important contributions and innovations that emerged from this unique American community.”

“I think it is true to say that she made Hip-Hop into an intellectual field of study,” Kincaid wrote in an emailed statement. “She made what seemed ordinary and perhaps something to be dismissed into a major school of study.”

Morgan’s scholarly background was in linguistic anthropology, and she published widely on language, culture, and identity, with a focus on the African Diaspora and urban speech communities.

She earned masters degrees from the University of Illinois in Chicago and the University of Essex, England, as well as a PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.

AAAS professor Brandon M. Terry ’05 said Morgan was “a linguistics prodigy,” whose “love of language and the creativity of African American language that led her to hip hop.”

“The fact that she was able to use her platform at Harvard to advocate for serious study of hip hop, the archiving of hip hop material — that changed a lot of how the broader world understood the significance of the genre,” Terry said.

In September, FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra approved the renaming of the archive in Morgan’s honor.

“Henceforth and forever, it will officially be known as the Marcyliena H. Morgan Hip Hop Archive and Research Institute,” Gates said. “And as the director of The Hutchins Center, I’m very proud of that.”

‘Truth Teller’ and ‘Community Builder’

Terry recalled that, while taking a linguistics class with Morgan as an undergraduate at the College, he had a one-on-one meeting with her where she told him she wanted to see “what all the fuss was about” when it came to his academic performance.

“It was one of those moments where somebody said, ‘You’re not great enough, but I think you can be better,’” Terry said.

“Those are really important moments, I think, in your growth as a student,” he added, “I try to be that way with my students.”

Morgan was described by her colleagues as someone who was unafraid to confront the truth, but also as someone who drew people together.

“Marcyliena Morgan was a quiet community builder,” wrote her husband, Lawrence D. Bobo, who is social science dean and a Sociology and AAAS professor, in an email statement.

“She was a truth teller, I think, and she was proud of that — and she was a community builder, and she was proud of that,” AAAS professor Ingrid Monson echoed in an interview.

Almost everyone who spoke of Morgan remembered her for her post-Thanksgiving dinners — a holiday of her own invention that she called, “it ain’t over yet” — where she hosted faculty, graduate students, and friends.

Gates described the dinners as being “like Thanksgiving all over again.”

“Marcy is the only person I know who has created a holiday,” Gates said. “It was even better than Thanksgiving, because there was even more food, a wider variety, no pressure, you know, the pressure of holidays.”

Part of what made Morgan’s post-Thanksgiving dinners memorable was her “legendary” cooking, according to History and AAAS professor Caroline M. Elkins — in particular, her coconut cake.

“I’m going to insist that I’m buried with a slice of that cake,” Elkins wrote in an emailed statement. “Why? Because in case I don’t make it there, it’s the closest thing to heaven I can possibly imagine!”

—Staff writer Sebastian B. Connolly can be reached at sebastian.connolly@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X at @SebastianC4784.

—Staff writer Julia A. Karabolli can be reached at julia.karabolli@thecrimson.com.