Carrie Monahan

Carrie Monahan is a second-year PhD student in history advised by Professors Andrew Kahrl and Grace Hale. Her master's thesis in progress, titled "Termination by Condemnation: Eminent Domain and the Dispossession of the Five Tribes' Restricted Allotments for the Eufaula Dam and Reservoir, 1958–1964," focuses on the intersection of postwar liberalism, hydraulic development, and Indian termination policy in rural southeast Oklahoma. For her academic achievements and potential in her field, she was selected by a faculty committee to receive the John L. Nau III Endowed Graduate Fellowship in American History Fund for the 2026-2027 academic year.

Before coming to UVA, Carrie worked as a journalist and producer in her hometown of New York City, reporting on politics, media, and culture across print, digital, and film. Her reporting has ranged from Florida conservation groups entangled in state politics to high-stakes land-use fights and power struggles on the East End of Long Island to collective memory of the forced removal and dispossession of Native Americans from Alabama to Oklahoma.

She has also worked in documentary film, producing projects about Rupert Murdoch’s media empire and its threats to global democracy; Honduran migration, narco-trafficking, and the country’s former president, Juan Orlando Hernández; and William F. Buckley Jr. and the American conservative movement. From 2019 to 2021, she served as a Reuters fact-check producer for Facebook’s now-defunct third-party fact-checking program, debunking viral disinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine roll out as well as the 2020 election and January 6 insurrection.

Carrie holds an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University, where she graduated with honors, and a B.A. in American Studies (with a minor in French) from Stanford University, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa and received the David M. Kennedy Prize for the top undergraduate thesis in the humanities.