Emerson Morgan
(he/him/his)
- Librarian for Special Collections
Areas of Study
Offices
Education
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MS, archives management, Simmons University
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PhD, AM, historical musicology and medieval studies, Harvard University
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MAR, religion and the arts, Yale Divinity School and Yale Institute of Sacred Music
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AB cum laude in materia subjecta, music, Vassar College
Biography
As the Librarian for Special Collections in the Conservatory Library, I enjoy bringing scholars, students, performers, readers, listeners, and viewers together with special music materials for research, teaching, learning, and playing.
I am trained both as an archivist and as a historical musicologist, with special experience in music source studies. I began my undergraduate studies as a composition major at the Oberlin Conservatory. Visiting archives and special collections in those years sparked interests for me in early music, improvisation, and oral history. It is my pleasure to be able to care for special collections in this special place and to open them up in hospitable and interdisciplinary ways.
Prior to joining the Oberlin College Libraries in 2022, I was a graduate teaching fellow for music history and theory at Harvard, a tutor in music history at Vassar, and a departmental tutor in music theory at Oberlin. I have served as a cataloger for the Frédéric Louis Ritter Collection at Tufts University and for the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) in its U.S. Office, as well as for art image collections at Artstor and the Yale Arts Library. My academic and professional research has appeared in journals of historical musicology and library science.
From 2023 to 2025, I serve as the organizational liaison between the Music Library Association and the American Musicological Society.
Emerson Morgan, Christina Linklater, and Pramantha Tagore, “‘Pure or Tainted?’ Representing a Source of Colonial Bengali-English Music in RISM,” Fontes Artis Musicae: Journal of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres 69, no. 3: Special Issue in Celebration of RISM’s 70th Anniversary (July–September 2022): 229–252.
Emerson Morgan, Chant and Urban Procession in Rouen 1150–1450, Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, May 2018.
Liza Vick et al., “Music History and Repertory: Critical Research Fluency for Harvard Undergraduates, a Team Approach,” in Information Literacy in Music: An Instructor’s Companion, 121–129, ed. B. Christensen et al., Music Library Association Technical Reports 35 (Middleton, Wisconsin: Music Library Association and A-R Editions, 2018).
Emerson Morgan, “A Previously Unknown Source for the Orgelbüchlein: Yale Misc. MS. 545,” Bach: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute 42, no. 2 (2011): 64–73.