Meaghan Morris (born 5 October 1950) is an Australian scholar of cultural studies. She is currently a Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney.
Born in Tenterfield, New South Wales, Morris was raised in Newcastle, New South Wales. Morris enrolled in a B.A. program in English and French at the University of Sydney. In Sydney, she met John Flaus, a film theorist and actor famous who would become a significant influence in the development of Australian cultural studies. She also became engaged in the work of British feminist scholar Juliet Mitchell and gave seminars on Mitchell's book Psychoanalysis and Feminism while pursuing a Maîtrise ès Lettres (similar to an MLitt) from the University of Paris-VIII on a French government scholarship between 1976 and 1978. Morris completed her dissertation on Madame de Tencin, a salonniere from the first half of the eighteenth century.
Upon returning to Australia, Morris co-edited two volumes informed by her intellectual experiences in France and also featuring English translations of work by Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, and Michel Foucault.
Between 1979 and 1985, Morris was chief film critic at the Sydney Morning Herald (1979-1981) and the Australian Financial Review (1981-1985). At the same time, she designed and taught courses in semiotics and film theory at the New South Wales Institute of Technology (now the University of Technology Sydney), Sydney College of the Arts, and Alexander Mackie College.
While holding numerous research and teaching fellowships over the next two decades, Morris did not hold a continuing academic position or have a specific institutional affiliation prior to her appointment in 2000 as founding Chair Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Her contribution to and impact on Australian and international cultural studies has instead been built on a large body of written work and activity as editor of collections and journals. In 1993, she co-edited (with John Frow) Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader (Sydney and Chicago: Allen & Unwin and University of Illinois Press). In 1995, she and anthropologist Stephen Muecke started the journal The UTS Review, which in 2002 became Cultural Studies Review. She received her Doctor of Philosophy in 1996 from the University of Technology, Sydney.
In 2012, Morris was the inaugural inductee to the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA) Hall of Fame.
