Levan Book Chat—William Handley, Horizons of Catastrophe in the American West

Event details Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2026 Time: 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM Location: Online Type: Lecture / Talk / Workshop Department: English, Levan Institute for the Humanities Audience: Students, Alumni, Faculty/Staff About this event A discussion of William Handley's new book, Horizons of Catastrophe in the American West (University of Nebraska Press, 2026). The author will be joined in conversation by Audrey Goodman (Georgia State University) and Hsuan L. Hsu (UC Davis), moderated by William Deverell (USC). Registration is required. REGISTER HERE About the Book: Horizons of Catastrophe in the American West contributes to discussions in the environmental humanities and western U.S. studies about how we read past cultural history in the light of our determined yet unknown future under climate catastrophe. Examining an eclectic but interrelated and interdisciplinary range of photographs, films, and novels of the West; Western historiography; geological science; Tony Kushner’s Angels in America; the Los Angeles freeway system and the city’s layered temporalities; and the long poem form among contemporary Indigenous poets, William R. Handley argues that artists within mostly twentieth-century settler cultures saw on past horizons of the West premonitions of catastrophe—without, of course, knowing what their civilization was doing to the atmosphere and what that portended for the planet’s future. The possibilities and limits of their artistic forms, Handley shows us, offer a way for us to find hope in the wreckage of the past and to forge a future grounded in environmental realism. About the Author: William R. Handley is Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Marriage, Violence, and Nation in the American Literary West, coeditor of True West: Authenticity and the American West (Bison Books, 2007), and editor of The Brokeback Book: From Story to Cultural Phenomenon (Bison Books, 2011). Open to attendants outside of USC. An excerpt of the book will be made available to registered attendants. Registration before the event is required. This event is part of the Levan Institute for the Humanities' “Book Chats” series, conversations about new books published by USC scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. To see more events in this series, including recordings of past events, visit https://dornsife.usc.edu/levan-institute/book-chats/. Official event details: https://calendar.usc.edu/event/levan-book-chatwilliam-handley-horizons-of-catastrophe-in-the-american-west