Meet the team behind the Black Women’s Diaries Project. We are a collective of historians, archivists, and writers dedicated to preserving and sharing the stories of Black women across generations.
Select a portrait to read each person’s biography.
Jennifer Putzi is Sara & Jess Cloud Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality, & Women’s Studies at William & Mary. She is the author, editor, or co-editor of seven books, including most recently Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) and The Reconstruction Diary of Frances Anne Rollin: A Critical Edition (University of North Carolina Press, 2025). She has served in various capacities, including Editor, at Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, for fifteen years. At William & Mary, she teaches courses in nineteenth-century American literature, women’s poetry, women’s diaries, and Digital Humanities.
Kirsten Lee is an Assistant Professor of English at Auburn University, where she teaches early African American studies with an emphasis on material culture, critical theory, book history, and Black women writers. Her current book project studies the aesthetic relationship between calls for reparations and abolitionism in Black print and manuscript of the long nineteenth century. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Early American Literature, American Literary History, the Journal of American Drama & Theatre and Resources for American Literary Study as well as various edited collections including Insensible of Boundaries: Studies in Mary Ann Shadd Cary (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025).
Rachel N. Hogan is the Instruction and Research Librarian for the Arts and Digital Humanities at William & Mary Libraries, where she supports reference, information literacy instruction, research and campus-wide projects and learning related to digital humanities. She received her Master of Science degree in Library and Information Science from Syracuse University and her Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from Pepperdine University. She is the co-author of “Scaffolding Text Encoding” in the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and “Embracing Bookness: Introducing Library Staff and Library Students to Text and Data Mining with HathiTrust Research Center” in Text and Data Mining for Librarians. She currently serves as the Digital Humanities Project Lead for the Black Women’s Diaries Project at William & Mary.
Brett Barney is a research associate professor at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Senior Associate Editor for the Walt Whitman Archive and the Charles Chesnutt Archive. He served two terms (2010-2013) on the TEI Consortium’s Technical Council and is currently part of VIDIT (Visualising and Investigating Differences in Texts, https://wg-vidit.github.io/), an international working group attempting to develop shared vocabulary and best practices for tools that visualize textual variation.
Ziz Kilmer is from Virginia and received their B.A. from William & Mary in January 2026 with a major in English and a minor in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. They began working with the Black Women’s Diaries Project in the spring of 2025. They are currently enrolled in the English Literature Doctoral Program at the University of Maryland. They continue to be inspired by their time with the BWDP and their current research interest is nineteenth-century African American women's literature.
Micah N. Hutchings is a senior at William & Mary pursuing a B.A. in Government and Africana Studies. Originally from Alexandria, Virginia, she is passionate about preserving Black history and bringing communities together. In 2024, Micah became the first student researcher for the Black Women’s Diaries Project and currently serves as the student lead for the 1872 diary of Mary Virginia Montgomery (1850–1902). She also serves as the Student Representative on the William & Mary Libraries Board of Directors. Micah was awarded the Roy R. Charles Center Honors Research Fellowship to pursue her honors thesis, “The Master’s Tools: Enslavers’ Homoeroticism as Pornographic Gaze, and the Afterlife of Black Sexual Subjugation in Contemporary Sexual Cultures.” After graduation, she plans to pursue a PhD in Black Studies.
Sapphire George is a senior at William & Mary from Manassas, Virginia, studying English with a minor in Computer Science. She has been with the Black Women’s Diaries Project since the spring of 2025 and is the student lead on the Sallie Sanders Venning Diary (to be published on the BWDP website in the fall of 2027). Sapphire is currently completing her Honor’s Thesis upon race and community in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Black women’s diaries and their encoding in TEI. Outside of academics, she is a classical double bassist in the William & Mary Symphony Orchestra. She is currently pursuing enrollment in graduate & doctoral research programs.
Marlow Gilkey is a sophomore from Chesapeake, Virginia, majoring in English and Environmental Science. They joined the Black Women’s Diaries Project in the spring of their freshman year and enjoy collaborating with other members of the project. They are a teaching assistant at William & Mary’s Center for Geospatial Analysis, with a passion for spatial epidemiology and helping students, and are the historian of Wordshop, a creative writing club on campus. They plan to study environmental literature and geospatial information systems while at William and Mary.
Ragan Tankard is a junior from Suffolk, Virginia, majoring in both English and Gender, Sexuality, & Women’s Studies. For her, the Black Women’s Diaries Project allows for a deeper understanding of Black women’s experiences during the nineteenth century and an exploration of the medium of diary writing from the perspective of storytelling, creating a fuller picture of these women’s lives. On campus, outside of research, she is a part of William & Mary’s Gamma Psi chapter of Phi Sigma Pi honors fraternity and the Flat Hat Magazine copyediting team. She also volunteers through William and Mary’s Compost club, teaching Williamsburg elementary school students about environmental concepts.
Justin Dalton is the Head of Digital Infrastructure, Applications, and Digitization at William & Mary Libraries. With more than 25 years of experience in software development, systems administration, and technology leadership, he develops and supports digital platforms that advance scholarship, preservation, and public access to cultural heritage collections. For the Black Women's Diaries Project, Justin provided technical leadership in developing the project's digital infrastructure and online presence. His work focused on creating sustainable systems for transcription, preservation, and discovery, helping make historically significant materials accessible to researchers and the public. He is passionate about using technology to preserve important stories and expand access to knowledge for future generations.
Sudipta Banerjee is a Web developer at William & Mary. Originally from India, he earned his bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering (ECE) from SRM Institute of Science and Technology in Chennai. He then spent three years at IBM in India, first as an Associate System Engineer and then as an Application Developer, working on secure transaction systems for Lloyds Banking Group (LBG-UK). He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. He is the holder of a patent for "An Augmented Reality Based Interactive System and a Method Thereof" and a coauthor of "Removal of iron from water using iron oxide coated hollow polymethylmethacrylate microspheres," published in Environmental Challenges (Elsevier, 2021). He has also competed in the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2021. He currently serves as the Web Developer for the Black Women's Diaries Project, where he builds and maintains the site through which the diaries reach their readers.
Lola Babalola is a visual and brand web designer with years of experience working across all kinds of projects, from branding and visual identities to websites and digital experiences. She loves bringing art and technology together to dream up designs that feel fresh, fun, and totally unique. She is always exploring new ideas, playing with color, typography, and visual storytelling, and finding creative ways to turn big ideas into memorable experiences.
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