Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

Biography

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett holds the James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning and is professor of public policy at the Price School at the University of Southern California. In 2022, she was appointed the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. In 2023, Currid-Halkett received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Currid-Halkett 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.

Currid-Halkett 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, and most recently  The Overlooked Americans (Basic Books, June 2023). Her books have been published in multiple languages.

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 Expert Network and has been a member of the WEF Global Future Councils and Industry Strategy Officers.

Selected Publications

• Choo, S., & Currid-Halkett, E. (2020). Socially Engaged Art(ists) and the ‘Just Turn’ in City Space: The Evolution of Gwanghwamun Plaza in Seoul, South Korea. Built Environment, 46(2).
• Currid‐Halkett, E., Lee, H., & Painter G. D. (2019). Veblen goods and urban distinction: The economic geography of conspicuous consumption. Journal of Regional Science, 59(1), 83-117.
• Currid-Halkett, E. (2017). The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class. Princeton: Princeton University Press.