Duke University has hired Wall Street Journal national affairs reporter Valerie Bauerlein as its Eugene Patterson Professor.
She has a special interest in small-town America and Southern politics, economics and culture. Bauerlein has covered the South Carolina presidential primaries for The Wall Street Journal since 2008. She also has covered natural and manmade disasters, from Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast and the mass slayings at Emanuel Church in Charleston to the deadly condominium collapse in Surfside, Fla.
Previously, she covered Coke, Pepsi and the beverage and snack industry for the Journal from Atlanta. She also covered Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Wachovia and other regional banks from their acquisition tear in 2005 to the crash in 2008.
She began her career at The Shelby (N.C.) Star and worked as a cops reporter at the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal, a legislative reporter at The State (Columbia, S.C.) and congressional correspondent for the News & Observer (Raleigh).
Bauerlein is the author of “The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty.” She is the host of “Camp Swamp Road,” an investigative podcast series for The Journal, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
