Afro-Am PhD Student Olivia Haynes Awarded Freedom on the Move Data Fellowship at Cornell University

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Olivia Haynes, doctoral student in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, has been awarded a Freedom on the Move Data Fellowship at Cornell University for summer 2024. 

Data fellows will further Freedom on the Move's mission of making all extant “runaway slave ads” from North American history free and accessible to researchers, students, and the public.

Through the eight-week fellowship program,  data fellows will work with scholars of slavery, resistance, marronage, and emancipation to help deepen the data available at freedomonthemove.org. The fellowship comes with room and board, as well as a stipend.

"Olivia's fellowship represents the type of public, digital Black humanities work that degrees and expertise in African American Studies/Africana Studies make possible," says Yolanda Covington-Ward, Chair of the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies. "We are so proud of Olivia for being selected for this fellowship and know that she will make valuable contributions to the Freedom on the Move project."

Freedom on the Move is a digital history project based in Cornell University’s Department of History in partnership with the Cornell University Library. 

Haynes received her B.A. in Visual and Material Culture with Africana Studies and Peace Studies from Goucher College in Baltimore, MD. Her research interests center on enslavement, with a particular focus on the American North, the visual and material culture of slavery, and Black motherhood and reproduction under enslavement. Her dissertation project delves into the lives of Black midwives, mothers, and birthing practices in the American North between the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries.