ericmorris3@gmail.com
Bio
Eric Morris is an Associate 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 Outer Limits. He created the comedy/action series Jack of All Trades, which starred Bruce Campbell as a spy fighting the Napoleonic Empire.
Eric holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in urban planning from UCLA. He has 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 statistics and transportation at Clemson.
Eric's interests how urbanization and transportation affect well-being and activity patterns; transportation equity; transportation and disadvantaged populations; transportation history; and transportation finance, economics, and management. He also has interests in economic geography and environmental economics.
Eric has authored or co-authored 17 papers in refereed academic journals. He has won two major paper awards: the Transportation Research Board's Wooten Award for best paper in the area of transportation policy and organization (one of seven such awards given out for papers on various aspects of transportation selected from the over 5400 papers submitted for the 2015 annual TRB conference/Transportation Research Record) and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning’s Chester Rapkin Award for best paper in the Journal of Planning Education and Research in 2017. He is currently co-authoring a book on the history and financing of the freeway system with Professor Taylor and Professor Jeffrey R. Brown of Florida State University.
Eric was a regular contributor to the Freakonomics blog, including for a 2 1/2 year stint on the New York Times website, for which he published 78 articles about various aspects of transportation. In addition, he served as associate editor of Access magazine.
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.
ACADEMIC CV
COMPLETE TELEVISION WRITING CREDITS
JACK OF ALL TRADES
LINKS TO SELECTED BROADCASTS &
PUBLICATIONS
