Alice Xu awarded 2024 Harold D. Lasswell Award for best dissertation in the field of public policy

The American Political Science Association (APSA) has announced that Assistant Professor Alice Xu of Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice (SP2) is the recipient of the 2024 Harold D. Lasswell Award, presented annually by the APSA to honor the best doctoral dissertation in the field of public policy. The leading professional organization for the study of political science, the APSA serves more than 11,000 members in more than 100 countries.

The citation from the award committee reads, “Amid very strong competition, Alice Xu’s dissertation, ‘Segregation and the Spatial Externalities of Inequality: A Theory of Interdependence and Public Goods in Cities’ stands out. It is theoretically ambitious, methodologically creative, deeply rigorous, expertly executed and elegantly crafted. This dissertation develops a new and more enlightened understanding of the factors that underlie support for the provision of public goods in urban settings, in the process opening up new methodological possibilities and theoretical lines of inquiry. The committee agrees that this is research of the highest quality and is thoroughly deserving of the Harold D. Lasswell Prize.”

Dr. Xu joined Penn in July of 2023 with a primary appointment at SP2 and a secondary appointment in the Political Science Department in the College of Arts and Sciences. Previously a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Leitner Program in Political Economy, she studies the comparative political economy of development with a focus on the politics of inequality and social policy, urban and distributive politics, and climate justice and environmental politics in the Global South.