William Deverell

William Deverell (born 1962) is a historian of the American West and a professor of history at the University of Southern California, where he directs the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and was Chair of the Department of History at Dornsife College and Arts and Sciences from 2014 to 2016.

Education William Deverell is from California. He graduated A.B. from Stanford University in June 1983. He took an MA in history at Princeton, and then stayed on to complete a PhD in history. Deverell was a postdoctoral instructor at the Huntington Library and California Institute of Technology. In 2008 and 2009 he was asked by the California court to testify as an expert witness in San Jose v. Union Pacific Railroad Corporation.

From 2009-2010 he worked at Yale University as Beinecke Senior Research Fellow at the Lamar Center. In June 2011 he co-founded the Los Angeles Service Academy, a high school outreach initiative, with Elizabeth Logan and Eryn Hoffman.

Deverell’s research has covered the Reconstruction era through to the closing of the American frontier.

Personal life In September 1995, Deverell married Jennifer Armstrong Watts, a curator of historical photography, in Summit, New Jersey. They have three children and live in Pasadena, California.

Selected publications