Thavolia Glymph

2025 DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI AWARD RECIPIENT

PhD '94 History

Thavolia Glymph is Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History, Professor of Law, and Faculty Research Scholar at the Duke Population Research Institute (DUPRI) and award-winning historian of the U.S. South. Her published work includes Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008), awarded the Philip Taft Labor History Award and was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (2020), awarded the Albert J. Beveridge Award and Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association; the Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award, Mary Nickliss Prize, and Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians; and book prizes from the Southern Association for Women, the Society of Civil War Historians and Watson-Brown Foundation, and the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History and was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize. She is co-editor of two volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867.

Glymph is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians; past president of the American Historical Association and the Southern Historical Association; and an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. She is historical consultant for museums and film and held the 2023-2024 Rogers Distinguished Fellowship in Nineteenth Century History at the Huntington Library and the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Duke Law School.