Joan Morgan

Joan Morgan, Ph.D. is Program Director of NYU’s Institute of African American Affairs & Center for Black Visual Culture (IAAA & CBVC), an award-winning feminist author, and a graduate of NYU’s American Studies Ph.D. program. A pioneering hip-hop journalist, Dr. Morgan coined the term “hip-hop feminism” in 1999, when her book was published, the groundbreaking When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost. Her book has been used in college coursework across the country. Regarded internationally as an expert on the topics of hip-hop, the Caribbean, and gender, Dr. Morgan has made numerous television, radio, and film appearances — among them HBOMax, Netflix, Lifetime, MTV, BET, VH-1, CNN, WBAI’s The Spin, and MSNBC. Dr. Morgan has been a Visiting Instructor at Duke University where she taught The History of Hip-Hop Journalism, a Visiting Research Scholar at Vanderbilt University, and Visiting Lecturer at Stanford University’s Institute for the Diversity of the Arts where she was the recipient of the prestigious 2013 Dr. St. Clair Drake Teaching Award for her course The Pleasure Principle: A Post-Hip Hop Search for a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure. She is the first Visiting Scholar to ever receive the award. She is also a recipient of the 2015 Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowship, the 2015 Penfield Fellowship, the 2016 American Fellowship Award, and a 2020 finalist for the ACLU Emerging Scholars Fellowship.

In 2018 Simon & Schuster published her book She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the acclaimed and influential debut album. Her writing is interdisciplinary as she explores the ways in which music, literature, history, feminism, and the arts provide an entry into her work. In her work, Dr. Morgan examines the complexity of representation of women in visual culture and music by focusing not only on the subjects but also by including a close read of archival materials that looks at the context in which these stories are created.