Two Women Professors Share the 2022 Goldsmith Book Prize

Caroline Tolbert, who holds the Lowell G. Battershell University Distinguished Chair of Political Science at the University of Iowa, and Karen Mossberger, the Frank and June Sackton Professor, in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University are sharing the 2022 Goldsmith Book Prize in Academics from the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

The scholars are being honored for their book Choosing the Future: Technology and Opportunity in Communities (Oxford University Press, 2021). The authors explore disparities in internet access across U.S. communities — states, counties, metro areas, cities, neighborhoods — and the effects of broadband access and use on local economic prosperity.

Dr. Tolbert joined the faculty at the University of Iowa in 2006 after eight years at Kent State University. She is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she majored in political science. She holds a master’s degree in public policy and a Ph.D. in political scence from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Dr. Mossberger joined the faculty at Arizona State in 2013 after teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees, all in political science and all from Wayne State University in Detroit.

The two women professors are sharing the award with co-author Scott LaCombe, an assistant professor of government and of statistical and data sciences at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.