Ann Morning

At Princeton, Morning was a student at the Office of Population Research, and her first research projects focused on the uses of racial classification in demographic data like censuses. In particular, she undertook quantitative analyses of the classification of groups that did not easily fit traditional American racial categories, such as mixed-race people and people of South Asian descent. With time, she developed an interest in individuals’ beliefs about the nature of racial difference, using the term “racial conceptualization” to get at the web of their interrelated beliefs about which groups constituted races, what demarcated them from each other, how they emerged, and how an individual’s membership in a racial group could be ascertained. Her doctoral dissertation explored such concepts using qualitative data, and went on to win the American Sociological Association’s Dissertation Award in 2005. In 2011, it was published by the University of California Press as The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference.

Ann Juanita Morning is an American sociologist and demographer whose research focuses on race. In particular, she has studied racial and ethnic classification on censuses worldwide, as well as beliefs about racial difference in the United States and Western Europe. Much of her work examines how contemporary science—particularly the field of genetics—influences how we conceptualize race. As an author, she is widely held in libraries worldwide.

Ann Morning continues to work on racial classification, racial conceptualization, and their intersection with contemporary science. A Fulbright scholarship to the University of Milan-Bicocca in 2008-09 resulted in her current book project investigating Italians’ beliefs about ethnic and racial difference, co-authored with sociologist Marcello Maneri of the University of Milan-Bicocca and due to be published by the Russell Sage Foundation.

While finishing up her doctoral dissertation, Morning worked as a consultant to the U.S. Census Bureau, gathering and analyzing data on census racial and ethnic enumeration on nearly 140 nations around the globe. After earning her doctorate in 2004, she joined New York University’s Department of Sociology as an Assistant Professor, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2011. Since 2012, Morning has also been an Affiliated Faculty Member at NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus, teaching there regularly. And since 2013, she has been a member of the U.S. Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations.

She left the Foreign Service in late 1995 to become an Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs at her former graduate school, Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). She remained at SIPA until beginning her doctoral studies at Princeton in the fall of 1997.

Morning began her career in 1992 as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where she monitored the external debt burden of a portfolio of less-industrialized nations. In 1994, she joined the U.S. Department of State as a Foreign Service Officer, serving as Vice Consul at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras and completed a temporary tour of duty at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York.

Morning received her primary- and secondary-school education at the United Nations International School in New York City, where she graduated with an International Baccalaureate in 1986. She then earned her B.A. in Economics and Political Science at Yale University in 1990. As an undergraduate she also studied in Paris at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques and Université de Paris III (Censier-Daubenton) during the 1988-89 academic year. In 1992, she earned a Master’s in International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and then a Ph.D. in Sociology in 2004 at Princeton University, where she was affiliated with the Office of Population Research.