“EXTRA SALTY.” IASPM-CANADA’S POPULAR MUSIC FUTURES SPEAKER SERIES.
NOVEMBER 2021

full bio

Morgan Bimm watched 10 Things I Hate About You at an incredibly impressionable age and the rest, as they say, is history. She completed a Bachelor of Journalism with double minors in Sexuality Studies and Film Studies at Carleton University, before going on to complete both an MA and a PhD at York University in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies. Her dissertation, “Girl Music of the Indie Rock Persuasion: Amplifying Indie Through 2000s Girl Culture,” examined the women, girls, and girl culture that played such a pivotal role in the cultural mainstreaming of 2000s indie rock music. Her ongoing research focuses on integrating fan studies, popular music studies, and feminist theory as they relate to the consumption, framing, and cultural afterlives of “girly” texts, music, and aesthetics. Broadly, her work is interested in the ways that technology and media work together to produce ideas about cultural relevance, audiences, and gender. 

Her academic publications include a journal article on punk activism and social media in Punk & Post-Punk, a co-authored chapter on Carly Rae Jepsen and Canadian cultural nationalism with Andi Schwartz (her academic soulmate) for The Places and Spaces of Canadian Pop Culture, a chapter on digital framings of girls’ agency in Youth Mediations and Affective Relations, and writing on the online meta-lives of protest signs featuring pop music lyrics in the newly released Stories of Feminist Protest and Resistance: Digital Performative Assemblies. Morgan’s creative nonfiction has also appeared in A.Side, Feminist Space Camp Magazine, Shameless Magazine, Feels, and The Niche.

Community-building is something Morgan strives for both within and outside of academia. She has presented research at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), the Fan Studies Network of North America (FSNNA), the Punk Scholars Network, and various chapters of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). Morgan has also presented her work to more general audiences at the Seattle Museum of Popular Culture’s annual PopCon, whose attendees include music writers, journalists, musicians, and fans. She is a founding and former executive member of the York University Girls’ Studies Research Network, a former research associate with the York University Institute for Research on Digital Literacies, and a current member of the Feminist Hive at St. Francis Xavier University. She is a current co-chair of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Gender and Feminisms caucus. Morgan has also previously sat on the steering committee for the Sex Salon Speaker Series (University of Toronto), volunteered with Girls Rock Camp Toronto, and climbed with Queer Climbers of Toronto. She is a certified Hiking Field Leader through the Outdoor Council of Canada (OCC).

At St. Francis Xavier University, Morgan teaches courses that explore the intersections between culture and gender, with a focus on helping students understand feminism’s relevance to their daily lives and cultural undertakings. As someone with a deep appreciation for feminist pedagogy, she has participated in multiple pedagogy intensives and workshops, offered virtually through universities as far away as the UK and Australia. Morgan also developed, funded, and facilitated an award-winning critical pedagogies seminar series during her time at York University, partnering with the Queer Student Caucus to deliver peer-to-peer pedagogy training and workshops to graduate students and early career faculty from across the university. She also co-organized a one-day teaching and learning symposium hosted entitled “Fugitive Spaces,” which led to peer-reviewed research on trauma-informed teaching as well as a collaboratively produced, open-access zine published in a special issue of MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture focused on feminist pedagogies.   

Currently, Morgan is publishing work from her dissertation and co-editing an upcoming special issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies (JPMS). When not writing and teaching, she can usually be found tromping through the woods, blasting the CBC in her little blue pickup truck, and planning her next camping adventure.

Nora is a five-year-old calico cat who Morgan adopted in October of 2022 after realizing that living alone through unprecedented times was simply not for her. Nora is very small, impossibly brave, and was lovingly described as “spicy” on the shelter website.

So far, this has proven to be accurate.