Morgan Harper

Morgan Harper is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute. Their dissertation considers a corpus of bad trip survival films produced by three Manhattan-based criminalized drug users: David Wojnarowicz, Zoë Lund, and Khalik Allah. This dissertation turns to the aesthetics of harm reduction to better understand how America’s War on Drugs has politicized morality. They theorize harm reduction as a pessimistic moral philosophy, treating these auteurs as significant contributors to harm reduction’s intellectual history.

Awards

• 2018 Claudia Gorbman Graduate Student Writing Award - Honourable Mention 
• 2018 Atom Egoyan Cinema Studies Scholarship 
• 2017-2018 SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship - Master’s Award