Duke Graduate Student Jobie Hill Awarded CLIR Grant to Fund Digitization Project

Jobie Hill, a Ph.D. student in Duke’s Department of History, was announced as a 2025 recipient of a prestigious Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Grant for her project Bearing Witness to Enslaved Women and Their Future Issue and Increase in the Massie Family’s 18th- and 19th-Century Reproductive Labor Systems (Bearing Witness). 

The project was one of only sixteen digitization projects that received funding through the Digitizing Hidden Collections: Amplifying Unheard Voices program. The program seeks to “deepen public understanding of the histories of communities whose work, experiences, and perspectives have been insufficiently recognized or attended.” Since its launch in 2021, the program has awarded nearly $12 million for 49 projects. The Bearing Witness project is set to receive $300,000 and take place between January 2026 to December 2028. 

Jobie, who is the project Principal Investigator, will be working alongside a project team consisting of the Duke Rubenstein Rare Book Manuscript Library, Briscoe Center for American History, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, Special Collections Research Center, Virginia Museum of History & Culture, and Saving Slave Houses. 

The project summary reads as follows: 

“Enslaved people were commodities that were bought, sold, traded, exchanged, gifted, willed, and transferred. Their black bodies were assigned monetary values subject to appreciation and depreciation. Strategic business processes, such as systematic tracking and bookkeeping ledgers, allowed slaveholders to count and control bodies, organize them for labor, and claim them as property. By adapting legacy accounting practices to the unique needs of slave breeding the Massie family converted enslaved women into mothers, mothers into birth records, and birth records into a self-sustaining reproducing labor system that yielded wealth-building dividends. Through these practices their sophisticated reproductive labor enterprise was sustained for more than a century. The project ‘Bearing Witness to Enslaved Women and Their Future Issue and Increase in the Massie Family’s 18th- and 19th-Century Reproductive Labor Systems’ shares knowledge about the reproductive labor of enslaved women with descendants, the public, and scholars.”

At the conclusion of the Bearing Witness project, a digitized Massie family collections will be available on open access platforms with standardized metadata. The database will allow the public to search for enslaved people across the more than 1,300 births of enslaved children that were documented in the collections. Additionally, Bearing Witness also plans to include the Guide to the Massie Family Archive to serve as the online finding aid to the holistic Massie collection.