Dr. Ann Morning to Give Annual Morris Rosenberg Lecture

The Morris Rosenberg Memorial Lectureship was established in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland to pay tribute to the scholarly contributions made by Dr. Rosenberg. The lectureship brings eminent sociologists to campus who have made substantial scholarly contributions to the discipline. The inaugural Rosenberg Lecture was given by Charles Tilly in October 1999. Since then, the Lectureship has brought some of the most prominent sociologists to speak to the UMD Sociology community. 

On November 7, 2025, Dr. Ann Morning will give this year's lecture, titled "Sociology in Real Time: Evolving Concepts of Race in the U.S."

Abstract 

Racial conceptualization—that is, the complex of beliefs about the nature of race and racial difference that individuals hold—has not received much attention from sociologists. While the sociology of race has long held an important place in our discipline (particularly as it is practiced in the United States), we have focused on other aspects of it: on “race relations,” socioeconomic inequality, prejudice and discrimination, institutional racism, and in more recent years, identification and classification. Yet racial conceptualization underpins many phenomena of interest to sociologists: race-related attitudes, practices, and policies. It comes as no surprise then that race—a fundamentally sociopolitical creation—has been, and continues to be, the object of political discourse across the party spectrum. I use pronouncements on the nature of race from two living U.S. presidents, one Democratic and the other Republican, to underscore not just the import of racial conceptualization but also the nimbleness with which sociologists have to attend to societal shifts as they unfold in real time.

Bio

Ann Morning is the Divisional Dean for Social Sciences, Vice Dean for Global and Strategic Initiatives, and James Weldon Johnson Professor of Sociology in New York University’s Faculty of Arts and Science. 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), An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States (with Marcello Maneri, Russell Sage 2022), and numerous articles. A former member of the U.S. Census Bureau National Advisory Board on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations, 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.