Morgan’s research interests include cultural policy, the cultural industries, music and economic development, cultural tourism, transnationalism, aesthetics, and the uses of music history. He has conducted research on several musical genres, including contemporary Argentine tango, “downtown” improvised music, and world music. Morgan’s undergraduate work on avant-garde bassist and producer Bill Laswell received the Hilldale award for undergraduate research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His M.A. thesis, “Tonight at Tonic: Practicing Place in a New York Art World” (2003), examined how musical values were cultivated for non-institutionalized “high art” musics by a transnational avant-garde music community centered on the nightclub Tonic, and how that community made sense of the rapid economic transformation the neighborhood in which the club was physically and symbolically emplaced was then undergoing.

Morgan’s current dissertation research focuses on music and cultural policy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he will be conducting fieldwork until the fall of 2007. Taking contemporary tango as its case, this project concentrates on the contested interconnections between the activities of musicians who have self-consciously returned to tango as means of re-exploring and re-articulating their identities as Argentines following the 2001 economic crisis and the cultural policies of the city government of Buenos Aires which channel and promote tango as an economic resource for the city and its citizens, primarily through programs that aim to develop the local cultural industries and cultural tourism. An article on themusical side of this equation, “Tango Renovación: On the Uses of Music History in Post-Crisis Argentina,” will appear in the forthcoming issue of Latin American Music Review (28:1, Spring/Summer 2007). Morgan has presented his work at the annual meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), the American Anthropological Society (AAA), the US and Latin American branches of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), and elsewhere. At Columbia, Morgan has served as the assistant editor of Current Musicology and as an instructor in the Music Humanities core course.

Email: mjl2003@columbia.edu