Education

M.A. University of Virginia (2024) 
B.A. Harvard University (2017)

Biography

Katie Wu is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History department. Her work focuses on post-Civil War America, with a particular focus on racialization, land/property, and memory. Her dissertation joins together African American history, Asian American studies, legal history, and ethnic studies to ask how a variety of "claims-seekers" sought compensation in the wake of racial injustice between 1871-1924. In asking how such movement strategies were mobilized, borrowed, and sometimes co-opted, her dissertation seeks to excavate the cultural and political landscape that animated early movements for reparations in the long 20th century. 

Alongside her graduate work, Katie is a co-creator of Tidewater Stories, a publicly available collection of oral history interviews documenting how Black residents in Hampton Roads, Virginia, have experienced and fought against environmental racism and inequality. The interviews explore eastern Virginia's 20th-century social and environmental history and were conducted through the Repair Lab during the summer of 2023. Katie has also conducted legal research on the sales of enslaved people in local archives with the Memory Project, and worked as an exhibit project manager for UVA's Hotel D exhibit, which documents the experience of enslaved laborers in Charlottesville. 

Prior to UVA, Katie served as the project manager of exhibits for the expansion of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum: from Enslavement to Mass Incarceration located in Montgomery, Alabama, and worked at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Harvard Art Museums. Katie graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University’s History and Literature program in 2017. 

Publications

“Stewards of a Stage - Place-Based Repair in Boston’s Council Chamber,” chapter in Reparative Histories: Conversations in the American Landscape, edited by Louis Nelson and Angel Parham, with Shaheen Alikhan and Katie Wu. University of Virginia Press, in press. 

Reparative Histories: Conversations in the American Landscape, edited by Louis Nelson and Angel Parham, with Shaheen Alikhan and Katie Wu. University of Virginia Press, in press. 

“‘We Have Made These Lands What They Are:’ Re-examining petitions, property claims, and the history of reparations on Edisto Island, 1861- 1880,” MA Thesis, The University of Virginia's Corcoran Department of History, 2024. 

Fellowships and Grants

• Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship, The National Museum of American History (2025)
• 2025 John Wertheimer/Davidson College Fellow, The American Society of Legal Historians (2025)
• Mellon Graduate Fellow for the U.S. Law and Race Initiative, The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (2025)
• Society of Fellows Summer Research Grant, University of Virginia Society of Fellows (2024-2025)
• Junior Fellow, Society of Fellows, University of Virginia (2024-2025)
• Nau Graduate Fellow, The John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History, University of Virginia (2023 - 2028)
• Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHSS) Summer Research Fellowship, University of Virginia (2024)
• Summer Dissertation Research Fellowship, Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia (2023)
• The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Student Council Spring Research Grant, University of Virginia (2023)
• Graduate Fellow, The Karsh Institute of Democracy (2022 - 2023)
• Editing & Public Scholarship Fellow, “Made by History” at the Washington Post & Governing America in a Global Era at UVA (2023)

Honors

• The Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award in the Arts and Humanities (April 2025)

Courses Taught

HIUS 2201: U.S. Immigration Law and Policy in Historical Perspective (with Professor S. Deborah Kang, Fall 2025). 

AMST 3180/ENG 3740: Introduction to Asian American Studies (TA for Professor Sylvia Chong, Spring 2025)

HIUS 5232: Oral History Workshop: A Hands-On Approach to Researching the Past (graduate researcher for Prof. Grace Hale, Spring 2025) 

AAS 3853: From Redlined to Subprime: Race and Real Estate in the US (TA for Professor Andrew Kahrl, Fall 2024)

AMST 2001: Introduction to American Studies (TA for Professors Grace Hale and Jack Hamilton, Fall 2023)