Overview
Thavolia Glymph holds the Peabody Family Distinguished Professorship in History and is a professor of History and Law and Faculty Research Scholar at the Duke Population Research Institute (DUPRI) and past president of the American Historical Association. She is the author of The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) which won the Albert J. Beveridge Award, American Historical Association; the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, American Historical Association, the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, Southern Association for Women Historians; Tom Watson Brown Book Award awarded by the Society of Civil War Historians and the Watson-Brown Foundation; the 2021 John Nau Prize awarded by the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History, University of Virginia; the 2021 Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award awarded by the Organization of American Historians; the 2021 Mary Nickliss Prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians; the 2021 Darlene Clark Hine Award awarded by the Organization of American Historians, and was a finalist for the 2021 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. Her book, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge University Press, 2008) was a winner of the 2009 Philip Taft Book Prize and a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize. She is co-editor of two volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 and numerous articles and essays. She is currently completing two book manuscripts, "African American Women and Children Refugees in the Civil War" supported by a National Institutes of Health grant and “Playing ‘Dixie’ in Egypt: A Transnational Transcript of Race, Nation, Empire and Citizenship." Glymph held the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Duke Law School in 2015 and 2018. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of American Historians, and the American Antiquarian Society and a past member of the Gettysburg Foundation and serves on several editorial boards. She is past president of the Southern Historical Association (2019-2020), an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, and held the 2023-24 Rogers Distinguished Fellow in Nineteenth Century American History at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Current Appointments & Affiliations
Recent Publications
Paper Tracings in the Spectacularly Boisterous Archive of Slavery
Journal Article American Historical Review · March 1, 2025 Full text Cite“I’m a Radical Black Girl”: Black Women Unionists and the Politics of Civil War History
Chapter · January 1, 2023 The history of southern women in the Civil War remains white-centered, mirroring wartime and postwar accounts that placed white women at the forefront of the battle for the home front. The politics of the “radical” women of Gonzalez, Texas, like the politi ... Full text CiteShe Wears the Flag of Our Country” Women, Nation, and War
Journal Article Journal of the Civil War Era · September 1, 2022 Full text CiteRecent Grants
The Rogers Distinguished Fellowship in Nineteenth-Century American History at The Huntington
ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens · 2023 - 2024African American Literature and Social History
Inst. Training Prgm or CMEFaculty Associate · Awarded by National Endowment for the Humanities · 2012 - 2013View All Grants