Before coming to Penn, I taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the City College of New York/the Graduate Center at CUNY, and Swarthmore College. My areas of research are philosophy of action, moral philosophy, philosophy of education, and political philosophy. I’m interested in how agents reason and act under conditions of adversity and in how educational institutions shape our agency. My book Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility, which has been awarded the Frederic W. Ness Book Award by the Association of American Colleges and Universities and selected as Princeton President Eisgruber’s Pre-Read for the Class of 2025, focuses on the ethical costs that first-generation and low-income students pay in order to take advantage of opportunities for socioeconomic mobility through education. You can learn more about my work at my webpage.
Jennifer Morton
Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Philosophy
Affiliated Faculty, Graduate School of Education
A.B. Princeton University
Ph.D. Stanford University
Selected Publications
Book
- Moving Up Without Losing Your Way (Princeton University Press, 2019)
Journal Articles
- Resisting Pessimism Traps: The Limits of Believing in Oneself Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (Forthcoming)
- Flourishing in the Academy: Complicity and Compromise APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, 2021.
- The Miseducation of the Elite The Journal of Political Philosophy, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12208
- Mitigating Ethical Costs in the Classroom Daedalus: The Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fall 2019
- Grit, (Co-authored with Sarah K. Paul, Ethics. Vol. 129, No. 2, pp. 175-203). [Philosopher’s Annual Selection 2019]
- Believing in Others, Philosophical Topics (Special Issue on ‘Can Beliefs Wrong?’). Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 75-95. (Co-authored with Sarah K. Paul).
- Reasoning Under Scarcity, Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Vol 95, Issue 3, 2017. Abstract
- The Educator’s Dual Role: Expressing Ideals While Educating in Non-Ideal Conditions, Educational Theory, Volume 66, Issue 3, June 2016, pp. 323–339 Abstract
- Unequal Classrooms: Higher Education and Online Learning Philosophical Inquiry in Education, Vol 23, No 2, 2016, pp. 97-113.
- Molding Conscientious, Hard-Working, and Perseverant Students Social Philosophy and Policy, Volume 31, Issue 1, January 2014, pp. 60-80.
- Of Reasons and Recognition, with Sarah Paul. Analysis, 2014, doi: 10.1093/analys/anu026 (Co-authored with Sarah K. Paul).
- Cultural Code-Switching: Straddling the Achievement Gap The Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 22, Number 3, September 2014, pp. 259–281.
- Deliberating for our Far Future Selves Ethical Theory and Moral Practice,Volume 16, Issue 4, August 2013, pp 809-828.
- The Non-Cognitive Challenge to a Liberal Egalitarian Education Theory and Research in Education, Volume 9, Issue 3, November 2011, pp. 233-250.
- Toward an Ecological Theory of the Norms of Practical Deliberation European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 19, Issue 4, December 2011, pp. 561-584.