Andy Horowitz is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, and also serves as the Connecticut State Historian. He was formerly Assistant Professor of History at Tulane University. 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. His 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.