Thavolia Glymph, Peabody Family Distinguished Professor

Professor Glymph is not taking new graduate students.

Thavolia Glymph holds the Peabody Family Distinguished Professorship in History and is a Professor of History, Professor of Law, Professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, and Faculty Research Scholar at the Duke Population Research Institute (DUPRI. 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 the author of numerous articles and essays and currently completing three book manuscripts, "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," and a history of Reconstruction.  

Glymph is past president of the American Historical Association (2024) and the Southern Historical Association (2020) and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Society of American Historians, and the American Antiquarian Society. She is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer and serves on several editorial boards and previously served on the Board of the Gettysburg Foundation. Honors include the 2025 Award for Distinguished Service to Labor and Working-Class History, the 2025 Raymond Gavins Distinguished Faculty Award from the Samuel DuBois Cook Society at Duke University, a Distinguished Alumni Award from Purdue University College of Liberal Arts, and a Rogers Distinguished Fellowship in Nineteenth Century American History at the Huntington Library in 2023-24. In 2015 and 2018, she was the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Duke Law School. 

Contact Info:

Office Location:	224 Classroom Building, Box 90719, 1356 Campus Drive, Durham, NC 27708
Email Address:
Web Page:	https://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/history/faculty/thavolia

Office Hours:

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

Education:

Ph.D.	Purdue University	1994
M.A.	Purdue University	1975
B.A.	Hampton University	1973

Specialties:

Race and Ethnicity
Politics, Public Life and Governance
Military History
Labor and Working Class History
Gender
United States and Canada

Research Interests: U.S. History, Slavery, Emancipation and Civil War, Southern Women

Keywords:

History • Muser Mentor

Current Ph.D. Students   (Former Students)

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

1. Glymph, T, Paper Tracings in the Spectacularly Boisterous Archive of Slavery, American Historical Review, vol. 130 no. 1 (March, 2025), pp. 1-18 [doi]
2. 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 Womens History Fifth Edition (January, 2023), pp. 399-418, ISBN 9780367514723 [doi]  [abs]
3. 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]
4. 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]
5. Glymph, T, The Women s Fight : A Coda, Labor Studies in Working Class History, vol. 18 no. 2 (May, 2021), pp. 83-91 [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