Jennifer Morton

Jennifer Morton is the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also holds a secondary appointment at the Graduate School of Education and serves as Graduate Chair in the Philosophy Department. She earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University and her A.B. from Princeton University. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania, Morton held faculty positions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, City College of New York, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Swarthmore College. She was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Faculty Fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values and is a senior fellow at the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During the 2023-2024 academic year, she was a fellow at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and a Guggenheim Fellow. Morton is an elected member-at-large of the American Philosophical Association’s Board.

Morton’s scholarship centers on the philosophy of education, with a focus on how poverty and social class shape agency. Her book, Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility (Princeton University Press, 2019), addresses the ethical sacrifices made by first-generation and low-income students in pursuit of upward mobility. The book received the 2023 Grawemeyer Award in Education and the Frederic W. Ness Book Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities; it was also selected as Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber’s Pre-Read for the Class of 2025. She has earned the American Philosophical Association’s Scheffler Prize for work in the philosophy of education, the Australasian Association of Philosophy’s 2017 Best AJP Paper Award for “Reasoning Under Scarcity” (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2017), and recognition from the Philosopher’s Annual for “Grit” (co-authored with Sarah K. Paul; Ethics, 2019) as one of the ten best philosophy papers of that year. Other key publications include “Cultural Code-Switching: Straddling the Achievement Gap” (Journal of Political Philosophy, 2014), “Believing in Others” (with Sarah K. Paul; Philosophical Topics, 2018), and “The Miseducation of the Elite” (Journal of Political Philosophy, 2020).