Marilyn A. Morris

Background

Marilyn Morris was born on April 5, 1957 in East Brunswick, New Jersey, United States, into the family of Charles M., and Stephanie J. (Wojciechowski) Morris.

Education

Marilyn Morris attended the University of Durham during 1977 - 1978. In 1979 Morris received a Bachelor of Arts at Hampshire College. She then attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1980. In 1988 Marilyn Morris earned a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of London.

Career

Marilyn Morris started her career at the University of London in 1983 as a Christie scholar in history at Royal Holloway College. Then she moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where she took the position of an associate research scholar in history and assistant editor of “The Papers of Benjamin Franklin” at Yale University and left that post in 1991. Since that time she has been living in Denton, Texas, where she works for the University of North Texas, first as an assistant professor and then as an associate professor of history.

Apart from her academic career, Marilyn writes books on monarchy, commerce, and theater in eighteenth-century England. She began studying the monarchy quite by accident. In London, difficulties with her dissertation topic on British political propaganda in the decade of the French Revolution coincided with the media frenzy surrounding the betrothal of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. That inspired her supervisor to recommend that she narrow her focus to the monarchy. Although dubious at first, she rapidly became caught up in the press coverage of the royal family, past and present.

While her first book concentrates on debates concerning the political power and ideological justification of monarchy, her current research turns to the institution’s social and cultural dimensions. Marilyn's studies of the royal family as a family and as consumers in a market society in the 1790s show striking parallels to discussions in the 1990s of the Wales’s separation and divorce and the queen’s personal income. Then, as now, the monarchy serves as an arena for debating social issues. In her next book Marilyn Morris investigated the forces that contributed to the formation of social mores and codes of propriety. Because press coverage of royalty was less extensive earlier in the century, she incorporated plays and theater reviews into her analysis.

Achievements

• Marilyn Morris is highly famous as the author and editor of books The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, The French Revolution of 1789 and Its Impact, and The British Monarchy and the French Revolution.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Sex, Money and Personal Character in Eighteenth-Century British Politics

    (How, and why, did the Anglo-American world become so obse...)

    2014
  • The British Monarchy and the French Revolution

    (Through a wide-ranging exploration of loyalist and reform...)

    1998
  • The French Revolution of 1789 and Its Impact

    (The essays in this collection, drawn from a Hofstra Unive...)

    1995

Views

Quotations: "I hope that my examination of the interconnected discourses on royalty, family, commerce, consumption, gambling, credit, debt, and the behavior of the upper ranks of society will contribute to our understanding of not only eighteenth-century society, but the twentieth-century obsession with the private lives of public figures."

Membership

• North American Conference on British Studies

• member of committee on lesbian and gay history

  American Historical Association

• merican Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

• World History Association

Connections

Father:

Charles M. Morris Jr.

Mother:

Stephanie J. (Wojciechowski) Morris