Carrie Monahan

Carrie Monahan is a PhD student in the history department advised by Professors Andrew Kahrl and Grace Hale. Her current research focuses on the intersection of postwar hydraulic development and Indian termination policy in rural southeast Oklahoma between 1958 and 1964. Before coming to UVA, she worked as a journalist and producer in New York, reporting on politics, media, and culture across print, digital, and film. Her reporting, published in Air Mail and The Bitter Southerner, 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, collaborating with The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta on a project about Rupert Murdoch’s media empire and its threats to global democracy, as well as with director James Marcus Haney on a film about Honduran migration, narco-trafficking, and the country’s former president, Juan Orlando Hernández. She was a co-producer on Barak Goodman’s 2024 PBS American Masters film The Incomparable Mr. Buckley, about 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. Advised by Professors Allyson Hobbs and Michele Elam, her thesis on the legacy of racial violence in Eufaula, Alabama was cited by historian Jefferson Cowie as “a brilliant elegy to place and memory” in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (2022).