Dr Morningstar is a social anthropologist with an interest in activism, politics, subjectivity, housing, art, and inequality. Her work has focused on the effects of the 2008 recession and housing crisis on young people’s employment and housing opportunities in the Republic of Ireland, as well as the relationship between democratic disenchantment and a range of social movements - especially the campaign to the Repeal the 8th amendment and legalise abortion, and ongoing campaigns for social and affordable housing. More recently, she has also explored the relationship between the housing crisis, anti-austerity activism after 2008, and the rising popularity of the pro-unification and nationalist party Sinn Féin, north and south of the Irish border.
Dr Morningstar is a Tutor at PACE and the Chandaria Teaching Associate, Bye-Fellow and Director of Studies in Human, Social & Political Sciences (HSPS) at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Prior to this, she held posts as an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow and a Teaching Associate and Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge. Since 2021, she has also held a post as a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent. Dr Morningstar earned her PhD and MPhil at the University of Cambridge and her BA in Anthropology at Yale University, where she specialised in biological and genetic anthropology in a four-field department.
Dr Morningstar's teaching style gives pride of place to active discussion and collaboration. She endeavours to draw connections between academic topics and current events, presenting social anthropology as a discipline with real contemporary relevance. She emphasises the open-ended nature of most questions we ask and discuss in the social sciences and so strives to make space for constructive, critical debate in the classroom.
