Andy Horowitz is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, and also serves as the Connecticut State Historian. As a scholar of the modern United States, his research focuses on disasters and the questions they give rise to about race, class, community, trauma, inequality, the welfare state, extractive industry, metropolitan development, and environmental change. More broadly, he is concerned with creating a usable past for the climate crisis: he writes histories designed to help readers think through problems that are often imagined to be without precedent. As a public historian, he works to support communities as they engage in acts of collective autobiography. Andy was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, and received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2014.
Andy's first book, Katrina: A History, 1915-2015 (Harvard University Press, 2020) won a 2021 Bancroft Prize in American History, and was named the 2021 Humanities Book of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, and a 2020 Best Nonfiction Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. He also co-edited Critical Disaster Studies (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), and served as guest editor for "Human/Nature," a 2021 special issue of Southern Cultures. He has published articles in the Journal of Southern History, Southern Cultures, and Historical Reflections, as well as essays in The Atlantic, Time, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times. As state historian, he serves as a member of the Historic Preservation Council, the State Capitol Preservation & Restoration Commission, the Connecticut State Historical Records Advisory Board, the Connecticut Coalition for History, and the Connecticut Semiquincentenntial Commission, as well as on the boards of the Museum of Connecticut History, Connecticut History Review, and CT Humanities.
Andy's dissertation on the causes and consequences of disaster in metropolitan New Orleans won the Southern Historical Association's C. Vann Woodward Prize for best dissertation in Southern history and Yale's George Washington Egleston Prize for best dissertation in American history.
Andy's teaching has covered five centuries of American history: north, south, east, and west, from city to wilderness. As a graduate student, he was awarded Yale's Prize Teaching Fellowship twice. At Tulane, his teaching was recognized with a William L. Duren '26 Professorship.
Before he began work on his Ph.D. in 2008, Andy founded the New Haven Oral History Project at Yale, directed the Imagining New Orleans documentary project in collaboration with the Southern Oral History Program and the Louisiana State Museum, and worked as a research associate at American Routes, the national public radio program. He also served as a mayoral appointee to the City of New Haven's Cultural Affairs Commission. He received a B.A. from Yale in 2003, and an M.S.L. from Yale Law School in 2023, the latter with the support of a New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation. Before joining the UConn faculty in 2022, he was Associate Professor of History and the Paul and Debra Gibbons Professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University.
Contact Andy at andy.horowitz (at) uconn.edu.