Author, speaker and researcher Elizabeth Currid-Halkett is the James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning and professor of public policy at the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on the arts and culture and most recently, the American consumer economy. She is the author of three books The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City (Princeton University Press 2007), Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) and The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class (Princeton University Press 2017). Currid-Halkett has spoken about her work to audiences at 92Y Tribeca, Google, Harvard University, Vanderbilt University, among others. Currid-Halkett’s work has been featured in numerous national and international media outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Salon, the Economist, the New Yorker, and the Times Literary Supplement. 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 currently working on a project with the World Economic Forum looking at key issues in the contemporary global consumer economy. Currid-Halkett received her PhD from Columbia University. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.