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Bio
Eric Morris is Professor of City and Regional Planning at Clemson University. He hails from Deerfield, IL, a suburb of Chicago. He attended Deerfield High School. As a child and teenager he worked as a professional actor, appearing in regional productions of Oliver!, Camelot, and Annie Get Your Gun.
Eric attended Harvard, graduating magna cum laude with a degree in History and Literature. He specialized in 17th century English history and wrote his senior thesis on the foundation of the Bank of England. While in college he was a writer for Let’s Go: Europe with a beat in still-communist Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. He also appeared in two Hasty Pudding Theatricals productions and wrote for the Harvard Crimson. His most notable accomplishment during this period was driving Michael Jordan’s cars.
After college Eric relocated to Los Angeles where he wrote and produced for television. His writing credits include episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, JAG, Xena: Warrior Princess, The Pretender and The Outer Limits. He created the comedy/action series Jack of All Trades, which starred Bruce Campbell as a spy fighting the Napoleonic Empire.
After leaving the entertainment business, Eric got an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from UCLA. He served as a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA's Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies and its Institute for Transportation Studies; he was also a Lecturer in UCLA's Department of Urban Planning. Eric currently teaches courses in transportation, urban history, and urban economics and economic geography at Clemson.
Eric's interests include how urbanization and transportation affect well-being, activity patterns, sociology and psychology; transportation and disadvantaged populations; transportation history; and transportation finance, economics, and management. He also has interests in economic geography, urban economics, and the future of transportation and urbanization in the post-pandemic era..
Eric has authored or co-authored 30 papers in refereed academic journals. He also co-authored the book The Drive for Dollars: How Fiscal Politics Shaped Urban Freeways and American Cities with Professor Brian D. Taylor of UCLA and Professor Jeffrey R. Brown of Florida State University. It was released by Oxford University Press in 2023. Eric has won several national paper awards including the Transportation Research Board's Wooten Award for best paper in the area of transportation policy and organization (one of seven such awards selected from the more than 5400 papers submitted for the 2015 TRB conference), the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning’s Chester Rapkin Award for best paper in the Journal of Planning Education and Research in 2017, and the IPUMS Research Award for best paper in the category of published research on time use in 2019. He was also the sole winner of the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research given by Clemson's nine-department College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities in 2018.
Eric was a regular contributor to the "Freakonomics" blog, including for a 2 1/2 year stint on the New York Times website. In this role he published 78 articles about various aspects of transportation and urbanization. In addition, he served as associate editor of Access magazine and as a handling editor for the Transportation Research Record.
When not using statistical methods to analyze traveling, Eric enjoys using statistical methods to analyze traveling – as in the "traveling" violation on the basketball court. For the 2009-2010 NBA season, Eric wrote about pro basketball on a weekly basis for the NBA's website, nba.com. His focus was the fantasy game, of which he is a rabid player. Eric also curates a decent-sized Grateful Dead bootleg collection, and is an obsessive Clemson Tigers football fan.
Eric lives in Greenville, SC.
CLEMSON WEBSITE INCL. CV
COMPLETE TELEVISION WRITING CREDITS
JACK OF ALL TRADES
THE DRIVE FOR DOLLARS
LINKS TO SELECTED BROADCASTS &
PUBLICATIONS
