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Jennifer Morton

Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Philosophy and Graduate Chair

Affiliated Faculty, Graduate School of Education

For appointments please use my calendly page.

 I’m Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Philosophy with a secondary appointment at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. I am also a senior fellow at the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During the 2023-2024 year, I was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

I’m interested in how poverty and social class shape our agency. My book Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility focuses on the ethical sacrifices that first-generation and low-income students make in pursuing upward mobility. It was awarded the Grawemeyer Award in Education and the Frederic W. Ness Book Award by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. It was also selected as Princeton President Eisgruber’s Pre-Read for the Class of 2025. You can learn more at: Hidden Brain podcast, The Atlantic, Inside Higher Education, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, New York Daily News, Times Higher Education,Princeton Alumni Weekly, Public Books, Forbes, and Vox.

I’ve received the American Philosophical Association’s Scheffler Prize for my work in the philsophy of education, my paper Reasoning Under Scarcity was award the Australasian Association of Philosophy‘s 2017 Best AJP Paper Award, and my paper Grit, cowritten with the brilliant Sarah Paul, was selected by the Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best philosophy papers published in 2019.

Previously, I have held positions at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the City College of New York, the Graduate Center-CUNY, and Swarthmore College. I received my Ph.D. from Stanford University and my A.B. from Princeton University. I’ve been a Laurance S. Rockefeller Faculty Fellow at the Princeton Center for Human Values. I’m an elected member-at-large of the American Philosophical Association’s Board.

I was born and grew up in Lima, Peru where I attended Colegio Franklin D. Roosevelt.

 

Selected Publications

Book

  • Moving Up Without Losing Your Way (Princeton University Press, 2019)

Journal Articles

  • "Trapped in the Present: Poverty and Prospective Agency" (Political Philosophy, Forthcoming)
  • “Educational Case Studies and Speaking for Others,” Educational Theory (2024). https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.1111/edth.12613
  • “Inequality in Planning Capacity,” Journal of Applied Philosophy. (2024). https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.1111/japp.12706
  • Resisting Pessimism Traps: The Limits of Believing in Yourself,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2022) https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.1111/phpr.12809
  • “Flourishing in the Academy: Complicity and Compromise,” Special Issue Reflections on Being a Low-Income and/or First-Generation Philosopher, APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy (2021)
  • “The Miseducation of the Elite,” Journal of Political Philosophy (2020) doi:10.1111/jopp.12208.
  • “Mitigating Ethical Costs in the Classroom,” Daedalus Vol. 148 No. 4 (2019): pp.179-194.
  • “Grit,” (With Sarah K. Paul) Ethics Vol. 129, No. 2, (2019): pp. 175-203. (Selected as one of the top ten philosophy papers of 2019 by the Philosopher’s Annual)
  • “Believing in Others,” (With Sarah K. Paul) Philosophical Topics (Special Issue on ‘Can Beliefs Wrong?’) Vol. 46, No. 1, (2018): pp. 75-95.
  •  “Reasoning Under Scarcity,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy Vol. 95, No. 3, (2017): pp. 543-559. (Winner of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy Best Paper Award.)
  • “The Educator’s Dual Role: Expressing Ideals While Educating in Non-Ideal Conditions,” Educational Theory Vol. 66, No. 3, (2016): pp. 323-339.
  • “Unequal Classrooms: Online Higher Education and Non-Cognitive Skills,” Philosophical Inquiry in Education Vol 23, No. 2, (2016): pp. 97-113.
  •  “Molding Conscientious, Hard-Working, and Perseverant Students,” Social Philosophy and Policy Vol. 31, No. 2, (2014): pp. 60-80. [ Reprinted in Education: Ideals and Practices, David Schmidtz, ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014.]
  •  “Cultural Code-Switching: Straddling the Achievement Gap,” The Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 22, No. 3, (2014): pp. 259-281.
  • “Deliberating for Our Far Future Selves,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice Vol. 16, No. 4, (2013): pp 809-828.
  • “The Non-Cognitive Challenge to a Liberal Egalitarian Education,” Theory and Research in Education Vol. 9, No. 3, (2011): pp. 233-250.
  • “Towards an Ecological Theory of the Norms of Practical Deliberation,” European Journal of Philosophy Vol. 19, No. 4, (2011): pp. 561-584.

jmmorton@sas.upenn.edu

Cohen 426

M 9-11:00am, T 12-2pm

CV (url)

Link to CV