ICW Team

William Deverell is the Divisional Dean for the Social Sciences at USC Dornsife and Professor of History in the Van Hunnick Department of History. He also directs the USC Libraries Collections Convergence Initiative. He previously taught at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Diego.

Professor Deverell teaches and writes about the nineteenth and twentieth century American West. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books exploring a variety of topics and themes. They include The Blackwell Companion to Los Angeles (co-edited with Greg Hise); The Blackwell Companion to California History (co-edited with David Igler); and The Blackwell Companion to the History of the American West. He is the author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and of Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910, as well as the recently-published Kathy Fiscus: A Tragedy that Transfixed the Nation. With the historian Tom Sitton, he is the co-editor of Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s and California Progressivism Revisited. With Greg Hise, he co-authored Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region and co-edited Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles. He and Professor Anne Hyde of the University of Oklahoma co-authored the two volume Shaped by the West: A History of North America. With co-editor Wade Graham, he is at work on a volume (to be published by the University of Chicago Press) on the human and natural history of Los Angeles County.  From 2022 to 2023, Professor Deverell served as the President of the Western History Association.

Contact: deverell@usc.edu

Eryn Hoffman has a B.A. with honors in History from Yale University, a Master’s in Child & Adolescent Literacy from Loyola Marymount University, and an Ed.D. in Organizational Leadership from USC. She serves as the Operations Director of ICW, supporting the exploration and scholarship of history and culture of California and the west. For the last 20 years, she has been deeply involved in K-12 education, with roles that have included history department chair and instructor, curriculum director, director of research, global programs director, and faculty mentor and professional development coach. Eryn’s work has been highlighted nationwide, including by the National Association of Independent Schools, the Hathaway-Brown/EE Ford Educational Innovation Summit, OESIS (Online Education Summit for Independent Schools), and The Today Show.

Contact: erynhoff@usc.edu and icw@dornsife.usc.edu.