Andy Horowitz specializes in modern American political, cultural, and environmental history. He is writing a book which is under contract with Harvard University Press. He used his time at A Studio in the Woods to revise the manuscript and think critically about the material.

Andy Horowitz is an Assistant Professor of History at Tulane University, where he specializes in modern American political, cultural, and environmental history. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2014. Over the past decade, his work on two places in particular – New Orleans, “the Land of Dreams,” and New Haven, “the Model City” – has explored how people respond when faced, by choice or by circumstance, with the loss of their homes and the need to re-imagine their communities.

Andy’s current book project, tentatively entitled How to Sink New Orleans: Katrina’s History, America’s Tragedy, ​1915-2015, is under contract with Harvard University Press. The book means to offer the definitive history of Katrina while exploring the questions the disaster gives rise to about ​race, class, community, trauma, inequality, the welfare state, urban and suburban development, extractive industry, and environmental change. 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. His writing has appeared in the Journal of Southern History, Southern Cultures, Historical Reflections, the Journal of American History, The Atlantic, Slate, Salon, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

​Andy’s teaching covers 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. In 2015-2016, he was a William L. Duren ’26 Professor at Tulane.

Before he began work on his Ph.D. in 2008, Andy was the founding director of the New Haven Oral History Project, directed the Imagining New Orleans documentary project after Katrina, and was a research associate at American Routes, the national public radio program. He received a B.A., magna cum laude, from Yale in 2003.