Marcyliena Morgan, 75, Scholar Who Brought Hip-Hop Into the Academy, Dies

Marcyliena H. Morgan, linguistic anthropologist and founding director of Harvard University’s Hiphop Archive & Research Institute, has died at 75 from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. Harvard and family colleagues said she passed on Sept. 28, 2025; the University has since renamed the archive in her honor.

Born in Chicago in 1950, Morgan spent her career legitimizing hip-hop as a serious field of study, arguing that rap is a dynamic “speech community” and a vital record of youth culture. Early skepticism gave way to advocacy as she listened to students and artists and began collecting artifacts that would seed Harvard’s first-of-its-kind archive.

Morgan joined Harvard in the early 2000s and formally established the Hiphop Archive in 2002, later housing it at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. This month, Harvard approved renaming the space the Marcyliena H. Morgan Hip Hop Archive & Research Institute, a move colleagues said was conveyed to her shortly before her death.

Her 2009 book, The Real Hiphop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground, distilled her view that—even with its excesses—hip-hop remains one of the rare arenas where young Black and Brown people are validated by their peers. “They are treated as gods and goddesses…for ‘representing’ truth and knowledge,” she wrote, a passage widely cited in remembrances.

Tributes from Harvard officials praised Morgan’s foresight and institution-building. Henry Louis Gates Jr. called her “the genius who conceived of the world’s first hip-hop archive,” while the Hutchins Center pledged to carry the work forward under her name.

Morgan is survived by her husband, Lawrence D. Bobo, Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences.