Author, Educator & Entrepreneur
Marilyn Morgan Westner is an award-winning author, educator, and entrepreneur. She explores themes of discrimination, social inequity, and segregation through the lens of pop culture. Her writing and classes have examined how advertising and the media use stories to communicate, challenge, and/or perpetuate stereotypes about race, gender, and disability over time. Her work resurfaces fascinating histories, highlights courageous acts by “regular” people, and follows the rise (and sometimes fall) of cultural icons and heroes.
She earned a Ph.D. in history and has taught history and archives courses at Harvard University, UMass Boston, and the University of Maine, and designed courses at Harvard Business School, and at Harvard, UMB, and Brown universities. For ten years, she worked as an archivist at the Schlesinger Library then served as Director of the Archives Track of UMB’s graduate program in history. That experience sparked her entrepreneurial spirit. She co-founded HBS Accelerate, an online educational platform for founders that closed in 2020, and Xander, a Boston-based startup that helps people with hearing loss.
Her work has appeared in several publications including Harvard Business Review, Founder’s Journey, the Journal of Popular Culture, the International Journal of the History of Sport, and several academic book collections. She contributes to projects that document the histories of the disenfranchised and underrepresented, including the African American National Biography, Stark and Subtle Divisions, and POOL: A Social History of Segregation. She is currently finishing writing her first book.