Morgan Carlton is a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, Mothering the Race: Social Work & Racial Uplift in Interwar Detroit, responds to Mitchell Hart's work on statistics and the shaping of public identity. Her work confronts how statistics shaped communal leaders' responses in regard to policing working class Jewish immigrants and Black Southern migrants within the city of Detroit.

Through focusing on migrating bodies, she centers the city's reactions to demographic changes and intra-communal reactions due to city concerns with the perceived assimilatory disruptions these new bodies may have caused.