Officers

Richard Blackett
President

Richard Blackett is Andrew Jackson Professor of History and a historian of the abolitionist movement in the US and particularly its transatlantic connections and the roles African Americans played in the movement to abolish slavery.

Lorri Glover
Vice President

Lorri Glover is John Francis Bannon Endowed Chair in the College of Arts and Sciences at Saint Louis University. A historian of early America, Glover is the author most recently of Eliza Lucas Pinckney: An Independent Woman in the Age of Revolution (Yale University Press, 2020). Glover also served as president of the Southern Association for Women Historians in 2015.

Randal Hall
Editor, Journal of Southern History

Randal L. Hall is an associate professor of history at Rice University. He is a graduate of Wake Forest University and Rice University. His latest work includes Mountains on the Market: Industry, the Environment, and the South (2012) and Seeing Jefferson Anew: In His Time and Ours, co-edited with John B. Boles (2010).

Stephen Berry
Secretary-Treasurer

Stephen Berry is Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era at the University of Georgia and author or editor of six books, including Count the Dead: Coroners, Quants, and the Birth of Death as We Know It (2022). Co-Director of the Center for Virtual History, he also oversees the web project CSI:Dixie, devoted to the 19c. coroner's office.

Past Presidents

Joseph P. Reidy
President 2023

Joseph P. Reidy is professor emeritus of history at Howard University. He is the author most recently of Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery, which won the Bancroft Prize and the 2020 John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History, and was a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.

Glenda Gilmore
President 2022

Glenda Gilmore is the Peter V. and C. Van Woodward Professor of History, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale University. She is the author also of Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950, a Washington Post’s Best Book of 2008 and Gender and Jim Crow:  Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920, winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the James A. Rawley Prize, the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, and the Heyman Prize.


Steven Hahn
President 2021

Steven Hahn is professor of history at New York University. He is the author of A Nation Without Borders: The United States and its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (2016) and A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, winner of Pulitzer Prize.

Thavolia Glymph
President 2020

Thavolia Glymph is professor of history and law and studies the U.S. South with a focus on nineteenth century social history. She is the author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008) and co-editor of two volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867.

Bill Link
President 2019

Bill Link is Richard J. Milbauer Professor at the University of Florida Department of History. He spent twenty-three years on the faculty of UNCG. His latest work includes Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (2003) and Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (2008).

Jane Turner Censer
President 2018

Jane Turner Censer is Professor of History at George Mason University. She is editor of volumes four and six of the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers as well as Sherwood Bonner’s Like unto Like. Much of her recent work has focused on southern women, including The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895 (2003).

John Boles
President 2017

John Boles is the William Pettus Hobby Professor of History at Rice University. In 2013, he retired after thirty years as Editor of the Journal of Southern History. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1969. His latest book is University Builder: Edgar Odell Lovett and the Founding of the Rice Institute (2007).

Catherine Clinton
President 2016

Catherine Clinton is the Denman Chair of American History at the University of Texas San Antonio. She is the author and editor of over two dozen volumes, including The Plantation MistressHarriet Tubman: The Road to FreedomMrs. Lincoln: A Life, and Stepdaughters of History: Southern Women and the American Civil War.

Barbara Fields
President 2015

Barbara J. Fields is Professor of History at Columbia University where she specializes in southern history and 19th-century social history. She is the author of Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (1992), and Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (1992).