USC Price School Professor Elizabeth Currid-Halkett has been awarded the Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the University of Iowa, joining a long list of accomplished scholars and writers to receive the honor.
As part of the visiting professorship, which will take place during the 2025-26 academic year, Currid-Halkett will deliver a lecture about her research on rural America. She is the author of “The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What It Means for Our Country.” Her book argues that rural and urban Americans have far more in common than not, and that many rural communities are faring much better than typically portrayed in media accounts.
“I feel incredibly honored to have been selected for this distinguished professorship given the past recipients, many of whom, across many fields, I have admired for their writing and scholarship,” Currid-Halkett said.
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Find Out MoreThe award is the latest achievement for Currid-Halkett, the James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning at the USC Price School of Public Policy. In 2023, she won the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and was previously appointed the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress.
The Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professorships program was established in 1978 with income from land donated by the late Ida Cordelia Beam, who left 291 acres to the University of Iowa for educational purposes. Proceeds from selling the farm allowed the university to develop a program of visiting professorships that would enhance the learning possibilities for faculty and students each year.
Previous recipients of the professorship include Sir Peter Hall, an influential geographer and planner; Anne-Marie Slaughter, the first woman to serve as the director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department; Nobel Prize in Literature winner Louise Glück; and USC’s very own Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, among many others.
