Education

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

Biography

Katie Wu is a third-year 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, currently titled "Indemnity and Justice for All: Race, Citizenship, and the Cultural Landscape of U.S. Reparations, 1871-1924," explores movements of claims-making led by African American, Chinese American, and Italian American petitioners in the wake of racial injustice. Her dissertation seeks to excavate the cultural and political landscape that animated early movements for reparations in the long 20th century. 

Alongside her graduate research at UVA, Katie has worked with the Repair Lab where she co-created an oral history archive of recently collected histories relating to environmental racism in Hampton Roads, Virginia. She has also worked as a researcher for the Memory Project and as the exhibit project manager for UVA's Hotel D exhibit, which documents the experience of enslaved laborers on campus. 

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. 

Awards and Honors

• Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship, The National Museum of American History (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)

Teaching Experience

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)