About

Ian Morris is the Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics at Stanford University, where he is also a faculty member in the Stanford Archaeology Center. He is a historian and archaeologist with a background that includes a B.A. from Birmingham University and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. Morris has excavated archaeological sites in Britain, Greece, and Italy, most recently directing Stanford's dig at Monte Polizzo, a native Sicilian site from the age of Greek colonization. His research has evolved from studying the rise of the Greek city-state to ancient economics, and now to global history since the Ice Age. He has published fifteen books, including the award-winning "Why the West Rules--For Now," which has been translated into thirteen languages, and his recent works include "Geography Is Destiny" published in 2022. Morris holds numerous academic and research fellowships, including positions as a Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He has served in leadership roles at Stanford, such as Chair of the Classics department, Director of the Archaeology Center, and Senior Associate Dean of Humanities and Sciences. His research interests encompass ancient history and classical archaeology, with a focus on ancient Greek archaeology and history.

Research topics

• Social Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• History
• Political Science
• Epistemology
• Environmental ethics
• Law
• Theology
• Art
• Social psychology
• Classics
• Pedagogy
• Psychology
• Art history
• Archaeology
• Public relations
• Geography
• Philosophy
• Literature
• Data science

Selected publications

• Finding consensus on well-being in education

  Theory and Research in Education · 2024 · 42 citations

  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Political Science

  Research on well-being and concern over the well-being of students and teachers has grown dramatically in recent years. Researchers and reformers in positive psychology and education, self-determination theory, social and emotional learning, liberal-democratic political and educational philosophy, and neo-Aristotelian theories of flourishing and character education have played formative and intersecting roles in what is now an international movement to promote the lifelong flourishing of students as an alternative to a human capital and economic growth focus for education. This article defends this flourishing-focused reorientation of education policy and practice, using a value-led and evidence-informed methodology. It sorts through the conceptual disputes and clarifies the ethical considerations that should guide efforts to advance the well-being of students and teachers, assesses key claims and arguments, and brings together compatible aspects of the leading philosophical and psychological perspectives on flourishing as an aim of education. It identifies ethically and evidentially justifiable points of consensus on well-being and flourishing in education, presents a consensus model of relationships between educational environments, learning, and flourishing, and concludes with some recommendations for educational policy and practice.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cursing the Candle: Models, Methods, and Morality

  Palgrave studies in ancient economies · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Efficient Sulfide and Methane Removal in Anaerobic Secondary Effluent Using a Pilot-Scale Membrane-Aerated Biofilm Reactor

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Scale, Information-Processing, and Complementarities in Old-World Axial Age Societies

  Journal of Social Computing · 2022-06-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Recent cross-disciplinary work on quantifying historical dynamics has made major contributions to scholarship. However, efforts to specify relationships between scale and information-processing always run a risk of shoehorning messy realities into overly rigid categories. In the case of the first-millennium BCE “Axial Age” in the Old World, networks of collective computing were structured more by cultural systems than by polities, and to understand the relationships between political scale and collective computational abilities, scholars need categories flexible enough to clarify the complementarities between political and cultural systems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Against Method

  American Journal of Archaeology · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Art history
  • Classics
  PublisherDOI

• Absent Archimedes – what?

  Interdisciplinary Science Reviews · 2022-10-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviel Netz offers a radically contingent counterfactual history in which the absence of Archimedes would have prevented early modern Europe's scientific revolution and perhaps the nineteenth-century industrial revolution too. I argue that we need to be more explicit about methods in counterfactual arguments. Techniques developed by economic historians and political scientists seem to point toward a more constrained range of possibilities, and also favor assigning more importance to external material forces. Absent Archimedes, I suggest, we would live in a different world from this one, but not very different.

  PublisherDOI

• Evolutionary history

  Evolutionary Psychology · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Few academic historians take an evolutionary perspective on the past, but this outcome was not inevitable. Leading eighteenth-century intellectuals often took evolutionary perspectives, but particularists largely discredited them in and after the 1780s. By the time Spencer and Darwin revived evolutionism in the 1850s, distinctive historical questions and methods were very well-established. Public intellectuals regularly called for Darwinian history, but almost no academics saw much to gain in it. Most twentieth-century social scientists became generalizers but not evolutionists, while most historians not only refused to engage in generalization of any kind but also criticized divisions of labor in which evolutionists would test theories against data generated by historians. Possibilities remain open for a properly evolutionary history, in which scholars trained as historians but asking evolutionary questions would work alongside those trained as evolutionists but analyzing historical data, but currently, this field's prospects depend too much on individual personalities and even luck.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An Introduction to Seshat

  Journal of Cognitive Historiography · 2020 · 26 citations

  • Social Science
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science

  This article introduces the Seshat: Global History Databank, its potential, and its methodology. Seshat is a databank containing vast amounts of quantitative data buttressed by qualitative nuance for a large sample of historical and archaeological polities. The sample is global in scope and covers the period from the Neolithic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution. Seshat allows scholars to capture dynamic processes and to test theories about the co-evolution (or not) of social scale and complexity, agriculture, warfare, religion, and any number of such Big Questions. Seshat is rapidly becoming a massive resource for innovative cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary research. Seshat is part of a growing trend to use comparative historical data on a large scale and contributes as such to a growing consilience between the humanities and social sciences. Seshat is underpinned by a robust and transparent workflow to ensure the ever growing dataset is of high quality.

  PublisherDOI

• Oral History Conversation with Ryan Sisson

  Digital USD (University of San Diego) · 2018-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Oral history interview with Ryan Sisson.

  Publisher

• ARCHAEOLOGY AND ARCHAIC GREEK HISTORY

  2018-05-15 · 94 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Lyle Whitsit

  Pacific Coast Imaging

  16 shared

• Smith Morgan

  Pacific Coast Imaging

  16 shared

• R Hentz

  Westinghouse Electric (Japan)

  16 shared

• A Palme

  Westinghouse Electric (Japan)

  16 shared

• Power Water

  Waters (United States)

  16 shared

• Ratio Control

  Pacific Coast Imaging

  16 shared

• C Axell

  Westinghouse Electric (Japan)

  16 shared

• Edison Co

  Westinghouse Electric (Japan)

  16 shared

Labs

• Ian Morris LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Classics

  Stanford University

  1992

• B.A., Classics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1987

Awards & honors

• Guggenheim Foundation Award
• Carnegie Foundation Award
• National Geographic Society Award
• Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching
• PEN-USA Prize for Non-Fiction (2011)