MACON – Mercer University’s Spencer B. King Jr. Center for Southern Studies will host this year’s Southern Intellectual History Circle keynote and reception on Feb. 21 at 5:30 p.m. in the Woodruff House. The event is free and open to the public.
The Southern Intellectual History Circle is an annual gathering of scholars of the American South to discuss the intellectual currents of history, literature and culture of the region.
This year’s keynote speaker is Dr. Thavolia Glymph, professor of history and law at Duke University and Faculty Research Scholar at Duke’s Population Research Institute.
“We are delighted to have Dr. Glymph in Macon and speaking at Mercer,” said Dr. Doug Thompson, associate professor of history and Southern studies and director of the Spencer B. King Jr. Center. “She has spent her career exploring the contours of African-American experiences in the Antebellum and Civil War South. Her lecture will expand our understanding of how emancipation and refugee status found expression as African-Americans moved to Egypt.”
Dr. Glymph studies the U.S. South with a focus on 19th-century social history. She is the author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, co-winner of the 2009 Philip Taft Book Prize and co-editor of two volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867.
She has also written Women at War: The Battle for Home, Freedom and Nation in the Civil War, 1861-65, which is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press, and is currently completing a book manuscript, titled African American Women and Children Refugees in the Civil War.
Dr. Glymph received a National Institutes of Health grant and served as the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Duke Law School in 2015 and 2018. She is currently an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, senior project scholar at the National Constitution Center and vice president of the Southern Historical Association.
She earned her B.A. at Hampton University and both her M.A. and Ph.D. at Purdue University.
About the Spencer B. King Jr. Center for Southern Studies
The Spencer B. King Jr. Center for Southern Studies fosters critical discussions about the many meanings of the South. As the only center for Southern studies in the United States dedicated to the education and enrichment of undergraduate students, the Center’s primary purpose is to examine the region’s complex history and culture through courses, conversations and events that are open, honest and accessible. In addition to private gifts from donors, the Center is supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant.
