William Deverell

Professor of History, Spatial Sciences, and Environmental Studies, University of Southern California

William Deverell is an American historian specializing in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American West. Their work covers political, social, ethnic, and environmental history. They are the founding director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (www.usc.edu/icw) and one of the founding directors of the Los Angeles Service Academy, a high school outreach initiative that educates students on the infrastructural networks of Southern California (LAServiceAcademy.org). They also direct the USC Libraries Collections Convergence Initiative. Their graduate students at USC study various aspects of Western history, including racial and ethnic history, the rise of conservative politics in the Southwest, and the region’s connections to the Pacific Rim. Current projects include the Chinatown History Project and the West on Fire Initiative.