Biography

Katie Wu is a second-year Ph.D. student in the History department. Her work focuses on post-Civil War America, with a particular focus on race, land, and memory. She is interested in the cultural and political landscape animating movements for reparations in the long 20th century.

Alongside her graduate research, Katie works with the Repair Lab where she is compiling an oral history archive of recently collected histories relating to environmental racism in the Hampton Roads region. 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.