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 and 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 from 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. Her first book, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge University Press, 2008) won the 2009 Philip Taft Book Prize. 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.