Thavolia Glymph

Thavolia Glymph is Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History, Professor of Law, and Faculty Research Scholar at the Duke Population Research Institute (DUPRI) at Duke University.

A historian of the U.S. South, her work explores the history of slavery, the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. She is the author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, a 2009 Philip Taft Book Prize recipient and a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize and The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation which won eight prizes including the Albert J. Beveridge Award and the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association; the Tom Watson Brown Book Award; the Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award, and the Mary Nickliss Prize, the Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians, and was a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.

She is co-editor of two volumes of the documentary history series, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 and has written numerous articles and essays that have appeared in journals and edited volumes. Glymph is president of the American Historical Association, past president of the Southern Historical Association, and an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. She is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, the Gettysburg Foundation Board of Directors, and the Society of American Historians, and the 2023-2024 Rogers Distinguished Fellowship in Nineteenth Century History at the Huntington Library. She has twice held the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Duke Law School and is a recipient of Duke University’s Thomas Langford Lectureship Award and an “Award for Outstanding Scholarship Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War from the National Park Service.

Glymph serves on several editorial boards and has served as a historical consultant for the National Constitution Center, the National Museum of African American History & Culture, the National Park Service, the New-York Historical Society, and the International African American Museum, and on films such as Harriet and Mercy Street.