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 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 published two edited 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. She later received a Ph.D. at the University of Technology, Sydney, where she wrote her dissertation on the subject of history in popular culture. In 1995, she and anthropologist Stephen Muecke started the journal The UTS Review, which in 2002 became Cultural Studies Review. Around this same time, Morris left for Hong Kong to take up the post of professorial chair at Lingnan University. In 2009 she joined the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and for some years worked half the year in Hong Kong and half in Australia. In addition to teaching and writing, Morris has been Senior Editor of TRACES, a multi-lingual journal of cultural theory published by Hong Kong University Press, and has served as Chair of the international Association for Cultural Studies and of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society. She serves on the editorial boards of more than twenty journals, including Cultural Studies Review, Qualitative Inquiry, and Public Culture. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities.
Works
Books
Morris, Meaghan. The pirate's fiancée: feminism, reading, postmodernism. London; New York: Verso.
Morris, M.. Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture. New Delhi & London: Sage Publications.
Edited Books
Morris, Meaghan and John Frow,. Australian cultural studies: a reader. St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin.
Morris, Meaghan and Brett de Bary,. Traces 2: Race Panic and the Memory of Migration. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Bennett, Tony, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris,. New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Morris, Meaghan, Siu Leung Li and Stephen Chan Ching-Kiu,. Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Morris, Meaghan and Mette Hjort,. Creativity and Academic Activism: Instituting Cultural Studies. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Driscoll, Catherine and Meaghan Morris,. Gender, Media and Modernity in the Asia-Pacific. London: Routledge.
