Congratulations to UT Alum Ed Morris for his tenure and promotion to Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky. Watch for his forthcoming book from Rutgers University Press in September.

Rutgers Center for Children and Childhood Studies

Edward Morris’s second book, Country Boys, City Boys: Masculinity, Place, and the Gender Gap in Education, examines the purported “gender gap” between boys and girls in educational achievement at two low-income high schools. This gender gap – in which girls outperform boys academically – has been much-discussed in the popular media, and has also been treated in a few academic books, but Morris’s exceptional ethnographic study brings a new perspective to this discussion by advancing a more theoretically grounded approach, allowing him to document this gender gap in achievement using contemporary gender theories. The author spent time in two low-income schools, one rural and predominantly white, the other urban and mostly African-American, and uses his in-depth, on-the-scene research to explain how race, class, and geographic location combine to influence and complicate the construction of gender identities among high school students. .