by Jeroslyn JoVonn
October 15, 2025
Marcyliena H. Morgan, founding director of Harvard’s Hip Hop Archive & Research Institute, died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Marcyliena H. Morgan, founding director of Harvard’s Hip Hop Archive & Research Institute, died Sept. 28 due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease, the Boston Globe reported.
A renowned linguistic anthropologist, Morgan founded the world’s first archive dedicated to hip-hop culture in 2002 forever changing how the genre was studied and understood. She became a leading advocate for recognizing hip-hop as a legitimate field of academic study—a perspective she grew to embrace herself after teaching an urban speech communities course at UCLA in the early 1990s, where she noticed her students increasingly centering their work on musicians.
“There was a class of 300 people and there were 80 papers on hip-hop,” she said in 2003. “I said, ‘No, no, no, this isn’t a course about fun.’ But they said, ‘You don’t understand, this is about real things, this is about life.’ So I decided to look at what they were saying.”
Initially put off by the genre’s misogynistic lyrics, Morgan, whose academic work already centered on race and gender, grew increasingly fascinated by hip-hop’s expanding cultural influence on youth and its artists’ inventive use of language to reflect Black culture and life in Black communities.
“Hip-hop has been pulling me this weird way all along,” she said in 2013. “I thought, ‘This is material culture, so let’s study it.’”
In 1996, Morgan pitched her bold proposal to Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., then director of what would later become Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, to establish an archive dedicated to hip-hop music and culture. After initial reservations, Gates was swayed by Morgan’s determination and passion for the project.
“‘This music,’ she said looking at me like I was an idiot, ‘was our youth vernacular language, manifesting itself in a completely new form of music, not only from coast to coast of the United States but spreading all around the world,’” Gates said at a 2024 symposium celebrating Morgan’s career. She insisted it was “the lingua franca of American popular culture” and here to stay, he added.
When Morgan launched the Hip Hop Archive & Research Institute in 2002, it became the world’s first and most comprehensive repository chronicling hip-hop’s evolution. Her groundbreaking work inspired the creation of similar archives at institutions including Cornell University, the University of Massachusetts Boston, Georgia State University, and the College of William & Mary.
One of the archive’s hallmark initiatives is the Classic Crates project, a curated collection of landmark hip-hop albums housed in Harvard’s Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library alongside works by Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin. Each album features scholarly liner notes written by Morgan, analyzing the intellectual and artistic achievements of the work and acknowledging the artists as classical composers.
The first four albums featured in Harvard’s Classic Crates were Illmatic by Nas, The Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Lauryn Hill, and To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar. Curated by producer 9th Wonder, the collection aims to preserve 200 seminal hip-hop albums.
Earlier this year, Dr. Hopi Hoekstra, Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, approved renaming the archive the Marcyliena H. Morgan Hip Hop Archive & Research Institute.
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