A team of students at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, are working on a new project to transcribe, annotate, and digitally encode the diaries of African American women from the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Led by Jennifer Putzi, the Sara and Jess Cloud Professor of English & Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and the W&M Libraries Faculty Scholar, the Black Women’s Diaries Project (BWDP) was first launched while Professor Putzi was writing The Reconstruction Diary of Frances Anne Rollin: A Critical Edition (University of North Carolina Press, 2025). During her research to contextualize Rollin’s diary, Putzi discovered other diaries by nineteenth-century African American women.
The BWDP now enrolls 10 student participants a semester. Along with Rachel Hogan, a research librarian at William & Mary’s Earl Grey Swem Library, and Kirsten Lee, project co-director and assistant professor at Auburn University in Alabama, Professor Putzi and her students work to digitize and encode the diaries, adding contextual materials from historical databases and archival newspaper research.
“There’s no project quite like this,” said Professor Putzi. “Plenty of sites cover correspondence but not diaries. We’re adapting code, inventing workflows, and learning together.”
In October 2026, the BWDP will launch its online database, beginning with the 1902 diary of Norfolk, Virginia, resident Florence Barbara. Once completed, the archive will feature a dozen diaries from Black women.
