Katlyn Marie Carter

Katlyn Marie Carter is associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. Her research and teaching focus on the origins of modern democracy through the study of 18th-century political culture and institutions. Her first book, Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions (Yale University Press, 2023), was awarded the Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies. It was also a finalist for the Rodel Institute’s Edwards Book Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the understanding and practice of democracy and American politics, and received honorable mention for the Louis Gottschalk Prize for an outstanding historical or critical study on the 18th century.

She has published work on the intellectual and political history of democracy in Past & Present, the Journal of the Early Republic, and French History. She has also written numerous op-eds for The Washington Post, Time, and the Age of Revolutions blog, for which she serves as an editor.

Carter’s project, “The Politics of Truth in Early America,” consists of a book and related college course designed to both explain and combat polarization through a focus on its impact on notions of truth in the public sphere. The book will tell the story of why early Americans worried about the truth, how they tried to secure it, and what happened when their efforts fell short. The accompanying course, “The Politics of Truth: A History,” aims to foster historical thinking in order to fight polarization by applying hard questions to the past as a way of breaking rigid political views.

May 2026