Reckoning with Race: Fluidity, Invention, and Reality

Ann Morning

Professor of Sociology

Ann Morning is Professor of Sociology at New York University and a member of NYU Abu Dhabi’s Affiliated Faculty. Trained in demography, her research focuses on race, ethnicity, and the sociology of science, especially as they pertain to census classification worldwide and to individuals’ concepts of difference.

She is the author of The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference (University of California Press 2011), and first author of An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States (with Marcello Maneri, Russell Sage 2022).

Morning was a 2008-09 Fulbright Research Fellow at the University of Milan-Bicocca, a 2014-15 Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, and a 2019 Visiting Professor at Institut d’Études Politiques (Sciences Po) in Paris. She was a member of the U.S. Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations from 2013 to 2019 and has consulted on ethnoracial statistics for the European Commission, the United Nations, the World Bank Group, and Elsevier. She is currently a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on the Use of Race, Ethnicity, and Ancestry as Population Descriptors in Genomics Research.

Morning holds her B.A. in Economics and Political Science magna cum laude from Yale University, a Master’s of International Affairs from Columbia University, and her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University.