Thavolia Glymph, the 140th president of the American Historical Association (AHA), is the first Black woman to hold this position. Glymph is a Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History and Law at Duke University, a past president of the Southern Historical Association, and a scholar with numerous awards.
Growing up in the South, she was encouraged to love history early on by her parents, maternal grandparents, an environment that valued education and public life, and regular trips to her local public library, she told AHA.
“History was unavoidable,” she explained. She began writing two or three-sentence letters to her grandmother when she was four years old. Her history education began at home and in the public library, with a focus on European histories due to their accessibility.
Glymph attended Hampton University, where she studied primary historical research, archive collections, and historiography. Alice Davis, her teacher at the time, had recently been discharged from the military. Davis’ lesson was where the pacesetter first became aware of her interest in undertaking research. That’s when she began to consider teaching history as a career.
Glymph’s 2008 book, “Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household,” explores the experiences of enslaved women and female enslavers on Southern plantations from the antebellum period to the Civil War and postwar era. The book reimagines the Southern plantation household as a space for gendered production, labor, and racial brutality.
Her 2020 book, “The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation,” received numerous awards, including two AHA prizes: the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in feminist theory and women’s history and the Albert J. Beveridge Award in the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada from 1492 to the present.
She mentors emerging academics and teaches courses on slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction at Duke. Glymph maintains an active lifestyle, playing tennis and herb gardening when not working.
She maintains that having a childhood interest in history does not imply becoming a professor, and that there was no “lightbulb moment” that shaped her into the person she is now. It was and continues to be “an improbable journey,” rather than a direct route.
She is currently the winner of the Huntington Library’s 2023-2024 Rogers Distinguished Fellowship in 19th-century American History.
As the new president of the American Historical Association, the newly appointed officer announced her plans to support the numerous significant current projects and to foster future endeavors aimed at ensuring that historians’ work is recognized and appreciated not only by other academics but also “by the larger communities we serve and those we still need to serve who are waiting for us to see them,” she stated.
Glymph takes office at a time when the Association is advocating for the teaching of true history in K-12 education, broadening the definitions of historical scholarship, and more.