Dr Morton Wan

I am a cultural historian of political economy and music, and a performer on keyboard instruments both historical and modern.

A Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, I earned my PhD in musicology from Cornell University in December 2024. My dissertation, “Songs of Speculation: Music and the Rise of Finance during the 1720 South Sea Bubble,” uncovers the surprising links between music and finance during the spectacular boom and bust of the early modern world’s first bubble economy. It was awarded Cornell’s Donald J. Grout Memorial Prize for an exceptional dissertation in music.

My current research spans two main areas: one examines how eighteenth-century music registered and refracted the value regimes of early financial markets; the other traces China’s entanglement with global trade through the piano, exploring how keyboard instruments transplanted into China since the seventeenth century come to reveal the economic contingencies of cultural mobility within capitalist modernity’s evolving geopolitical architecture. Though distinct in geography and timescale, these projects converge in examining music’s embeddedness in the economic realities and imaginaries of its time—and in showing how music can prompt us to think anew about a global history of capitalism.

My research has been supported by fellowships and grants, including from the American Musicological Society, the Huntington Library, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies at UCLA, the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music, and Cornell’s Institute for European Studies, Council for the Arts, and Center for Historical Keyboards.

I studied economics and philosophy (BEcon, University of Hong Kong) as well as music (MSt with distinction, University of Oxford; MPhil, University of Hong Kong). I also trained as a keyboardist at the Royal Academy of Music in London and at McGill University in Montreal. Prior to joining Oxford, I served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and as a Teaching Associate at Cornell University.

For current projects and publications, please see my college profile.