Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett is the James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning and professor of public policy at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. She teaches courses in economic development and urban policy and planning. Her research focuses on the arts and culture, the American consumer economy and the role of culture in geographic and class divides.

She is the author of The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City (Princeton University Press 2007); Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity (Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) and The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class (Princeton University Press, 2017), which was named one of the best books of the year by The Economist. Her books have been published in multiple languages. Her book, The Overlooked Americans, has been published by Basic Books (2023).

Currid-Halkett’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Salon, the Economist, the New Yorker, and the Times Literary Supplement, among others. She has contributed to a variety of academic and mainstream publications including the Journal of Economic Geography, Economic Development Quarterly, the Journal of the American Planning Association, the New York Times, and the Harvard Business Review.

She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Industry Strategy Officers and has been a member of the WEF Global Future Councils.

Currently Currid-Halkett is working on a book which revisits de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to better understand how culture and politics of culture influence the current geographic and class divisions in American society.

Ph.D., Urban Planning, Columbia University
M.S., Public Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University
B.A., Professional Writing and Creative Writing, minor in Business Administration and Environmental Policy, Carnegie Mellon University

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