UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — “Playing ‘Dixie’ in Egypt: A Transnational Transcript of Race, Nation, Empire and Citizenship” is the theme of the three lectures being delivered April 18-20 by Thavolia Glymph, Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History and professor of law at Duke University and a faculty research scholar at the Duke Population Research Institute, as part of the Steven and Janice Brose Distinguished Lecture Series.
Glymph’s research and teaching explores the history of slavery and plantation economies, the U.S. Civil War, emancipation and Reconstruction. She is the author of the multiple award-winning book, “The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation” (University of North Carolina Press, 2020); and “Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household” (Cambridge University Press, 2008), which won the 2009 Philip Taft Book Prize and was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize. She also co-edited two volumes of the prize-winning documentary series, “Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867,” and has written numerous articles and essays, including the award-winning article “Rose’s War and the Gendered Politics of Slave Insurgency in the Civil War,” which received the George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in the Journal of the Civil War Era in 2013.
Glymph is president-elect of the American Historical Association, holder of the 2023-24 Rogers Distinguished Fellowship in Nineteenth Century History at the Huntington Library, and past president of the Southern Historical Association. She is also an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer and an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Antiquarian Society and the Gettysburg Foundation Board of Directors. She has also been a historical consultant to several prominent national museums and historical centers and has also consulted on films such as "Harriet" and “Mercy Street.”
All three of Glymph’s lectures are a study of white Northern and Southern Civil War veterans who joined the Egyptian Army during the Reconstruction Era. Glymph's presentations will recount the factors that motivated the veterans to join a foreign army and note some of their military exploits in Egypt as mercenaries, military surveyors, doctors, and engineers. The focus, however, will be on the veterans' participation in the making of a transnational transcript—a global copying, writing over again, and transferring across space—of racist ideologies and ideas of citizenship and national belonging, and imperialism and empire in support of white supremacy.
All three lectures, which are free and open to the public, will be held in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on Penn State’s University Park campus. Titles and scheduled dates/times for each lecture are as follows:
- “’I am not going into the wilds of Africa’: Race and Nation in the Imagination of U.S. Civil War Veterans in Egypt” – 5 p.m., Thursday, April 18
- “Playing ‘Dixie’ in the Wilds of Africa” – 5 p.m., Friday, April 19
- “Egypt in the American Imaginary and the Making of an American Archive of Race and Nation” – 11:30 a.m., Saturday, April 20
The Brose Distinguished Lecture Series is offered by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center through an endowment created by Steven and Janice Brose. The series is co-sponsored by the University Libraries. For more information, contact the Richards Center at 814-863-0151 or visit the center’s website.