Job Details

Bearing Witness to Enslaved Women and Their Future Issue and Increase in the Massie Family’s 18th- and 19th-Century Reproductive Labor Systems,” a project funded by CLIR’s Digitizing Hidden Special Collections & Archives program, seeks 2-4 Graduate Research Assistants (GRA). GRAs will assist with  

•  review of scanned documents; 
• development of the Enslaved Persons Database and public dataset; 
• collection guide website development and maintenance; and  
• outreach activities (e.g., public programming, event promotion, social media posts, blog posts, and exhibitions). 

GRAs will be supervised by Duke Libraries’ Digital Humanities Consultant, one of the project’s co-Principal Investigators. Compensation is set at $18.00 per hour for either 5 or 10 hours per week beginning Monday, May 25th, 2026. Applicants will be asked to specify which amount of time they would like to work. 

Some work will be remote, and other work will be conducted at Duke’s David M. Rubenstein Library on West Campus. The student will be provided with any available equipment and software needed to complete specialized tasks. All workflows, platforms, and skills will be taught/learned as part of the work. 

GRAs and their supervisor, in carrying out their tasks, will uphold Duke University’s commitment to the principles of excellence, fairness, and respect for all people. As part of this commitment, Duke actively values diversity in the workplace, and seeks to take advantage of the rich backgrounds and abilities of everyone. Learn more. 

About Bearing Witness 

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 the Massie family’s 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. 

The Bearing Witness project explores the century-spanning reproductive labor of enslaved women at the Massie family’s Pharsalia Plantation in Virginia. Documentation of reproductive labor and slave breeding processes in the Massie records are not graphic or sexually explicit accounts of conception. They are bookkeeping entries in the form of birth records of enslaved children. In the birth records an enslaved person was identified and tracked by name, mother’s name, birthdate (day, month, year), and family separation events (e.g., death, sale). The Massie birth records and other slave journals tracked characteristics about children and women they deemed valuable and profitable to their family and its legacy of wealth.