October 15, 2025
Marcyliena H. Morgan, founding director of Harvard’s Hip Hop Archive & Analysis Institute, died from issues of Alzheimer’s illness.
Marcyliena H. Morgan, founding director of Harvard’s Hip Hop Archive & Analysis Institute, died Sept. 28 resulting from issues from Alzheimer’s illness, the Boston Globe reported.
A famend linguistic anthropologist, Morgan based the world’s first archive devoted to hip-hop tradition in 2002 perpetually altering how the style was studied and understood. She grew to become a number one advocate for recognizing hip-hop as a respectable discipline of educational research—a perspective she grew to embrace herself after educating an city speech communities course at UCLA within the early Nineties, the place she observed her college students more and more centering their work on musicians.
“There was a category of 300 individuals and there have been 80 papers on hip-hop,” she mentioned in 2003. “I mentioned, ‘No, no, no, this isn’t a course about enjoyable.’ However they mentioned, ‘You don’t perceive, that is about actual issues, that is about life.’ So I made a decision to have a look at what they had been saying.”
Initially postpone by the style’s misogynistic lyrics, Morgan, whose educational work already centered on race and gender, grew more and more fascinated by hip-hop’s increasing cultural affect on youth and its artists’ creative use of language to mirror Black tradition and life in Black communities.
“Hip-hop has been pulling me this bizarre approach all alongside,” she mentioned in 2013. “I assumed, ‘That is materials tradition, so let’s research it.’”
In 1996, Morgan pitched her daring proposal to Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., then director of what would later develop into Harvard’s Hutchins Middle for African & African American Analysis, to determine an archive devoted to hip-hop music and tradition. After preliminary reservations, Gates was swayed by Morgan’s willpower and keenness for the challenge.
“‘This music,’ she mentioned taking a look at me like I used to be an fool, ‘was our youth vernacular language, manifesting itself in a very new type of music, not solely from coast to coast of the US however spreading all around the globe,’” Gates mentioned at a 2024 symposium celebrating Morgan’s profession. She insisted it was “the lingua franca of American in style tradition” and right here to remain, he added.
When Morgan launched the Hip Hop Archive & Analysis Institute in 2002, it grew to become the world’s first and most complete repository chronicling hip-hop’s evolution. Her groundbreaking work impressed the creation of comparable archives at establishments together with Cornell College, the College of Massachusetts Boston, Georgia State College, and the School of William & Mary.
One of many archive’s hallmark initiatives is the Traditional Crates challenge, a curated assortment of landmark hip-hop albums housed in Harvard’s Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library alongside works by Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin. Every album options scholarly liner notes written by Morgan, analyzing the mental and inventive achievements of the work and acknowledging the artists as classical composers.
The primary 4 albums featured in Harvard’s Traditional Crates had been Illmatic by Nas, The Low Finish Principle by A Tribe Known as Quest, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Lauryn Hill, and To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar. Curated by producer ninth Marvel, the gathering goals to protect 200 seminal hip-hop albums.
Earlier this yr, Dr. Hopi Hoekstra, Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, authorized renaming the archive the Marcyliena H. Morgan Hip Hop Archive & Analysis Institute.
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