Thavolia Glymph, Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History

Please note: Thavolia has left the "African & African American Studies" group at Duke University; some info here might not be up to date.

Thavolia Glymph is Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History, Professor of Law, Faculty Research Scholar at the Duke Population Research Institute (DUPRI), and associate chair of the Department of History. She is president-elect of the American Historical Association. Glymph's research and teaching fields are slavery, emancipation, plantation societies and economies, gender and women’s history, and the Civil War history and Reconstruction. She is the author of The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation, Littlefield History of the Civil War Era Series (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 first 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 is currently completing a book manuscript titled African American Women and Children Refugees in the Civil War which has received support from a National Institutes of Health grant. In 2015 and 2018, Glymph served as the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Duke Law School.  She is past president of the Southern Historical Association (2019-2020), an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, a member of the Scholarly Advisory Board of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and an elected member of the Society of American Historians. the Society of American Historians Executive Board, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Board of Directors of the Gettysburg Foundation.  
 

Contact Info:

Office Location:	224 Classroom Building, Box 90719, 1356 Campus Drive, Durham, NC 27708
Office Phone:	(919) 668-1625
Email Address:

Office Hours:

Tuesday, 2:00-4:00pm and by appointment

Education:

Ph.D.	Purdue University	1994
M.A.	Purdue University
B.A.	Hampton University

Specialties:

19th Century US
Diaspora Studies

Research Interests: Southern US, Slavery and Emancipation, Comparative Emancipation, Civil War, Southern Women

Thavolia Glymph is Associate Professor of history in the Department of History and the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University and holds a Faculty Affiliate appointment in the Duke Population Research Institute and the Duke Program in Women’s Studies. Glymph is a historian of the nineteenth century U.S. South whose research focuses on questions of labor, gender, race, slavery, emancipation, war and society, and, broadly, political economy. Her publications include “Rose’s War and the Gendered Politics of a Slave Insurgency in the Civil War,” recipient of the George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era in 2013 and Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge, 2008), co-winner of the Philip Taft Book Prize and a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. She is also a co-editor two volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, ser. 1, vol. 1 and ser. 1 vol. 3 and is currently currently completing two book projects: Women at War: Race, Gender, and Power in the American Civil War to be published by the University of North Carolina Press and African American Women and Children Refugees in the Civil War. Glymph has received research support from the National Institutes of Health for her work on Civil War refugees and was the 2015 John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Duke Law School. She is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer and a member of the American Antiquarian Society.

Keywords:

History • Muser Mentor

Current Ph.D. Students   (Former Students)

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

1. Glymph, T, “I’m a Radical Black Girl”: Black Women Unionists and the Politics of Civil War History, in Unequal Sisters: A Revolutionary Reader in U.S. Women’s History: Fifth Edition (January, 2023), pp. 399-418, ISBN 9780367514723 [doi]  [abs]
2. Glymph, T, She Wears the Flag of Our Country” Women, Nation, and War, Journal of the Civil War Era, vol. 12 no. 3 (September, 2022), pp. 305-320 [doi]
3. Glymph, T; Harders, L, "There is No Silence in the Archive, There are Silencers" Thavolia Glymph in Conversation about Gerda Lerner with Levke Harders, Osterreichische Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaften, vol. 33 no. 2 (January, 2022), pp. 159-170 [doi]
4. Glymph, T, The Women s Fight : A Coda, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, vol. 18 no. 2 (May, 2021), pp. 83-91 [doi]
5. Glymph, T, Crying for Home, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, vol. 17 no. 3 (September, 2020), pp. 113-116 [doi]

Conferences Organized

• Organizer : Du Bois's Black Reconstruction: 75th Anniversary Symposium. November 30, 2011, Organizer : Du Bois's Black Reconstruction: 75th Anniversary Symposium, November 10-12, 2010  
• Co-Organizer (with William Darity and Bayo Holsey), Memory and Monuments Conference. February 01, 2008, Co-Organizer (with William Darity and Bayo Holsey), Memory and Monuments Conference, April 15-17, 2009  
• Women and Empire Symposium, Co-organizer, March 22-23, 2006  
• Race, Space, Place: The Making and Unmaking of Freedom in the Atlantic World, Co-convener, Spring 2006