Morton Wan

Overview

I am a PhD candidate in musicology at Cornell University. My research broadly concerns the entwinement of music and political economy in history. I am currently completing my dissertation—a musical history of the world’s first modern financial meltdown in 1720 known as the South Sea Bubble. It examines the reciprocal influences between the speculative crisis and contemporaneous musical practice and discourse, arguing that European musical life provides a vital framework for understanding the advent of modern financial capitalism both through and as cultural history.

Meanwhile, I am also working on a suite of projects that I hope will culminate in an economic history of keyboard instruments in China spanning the late seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. My latest archival research in Shanghai, Beijing, and London kick-started an extensive study into the globally activated financial, ecological, and colonial networks behind China’s first commercially manufactured piano, turned out in 1897 by the Shanghai-based British piano company S. Moutrie & Co.

My research has been bolstered by fellowships and grants including from the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies at UCLA, the Institute for European Studies and the Center for Historical Keyboards at Cornell University.

I hold a BA in economics and philosophy and an MPhil in musicology from the University of Hong Kong. Between these two degrees, I earned an MSt in music with distinction from Oxford University. I am also an active pianist and harpsichordist, having received my professional training at the Royal Academy of Music in London and McGill University in Montreal.

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