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Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore is an award-winning historian of the American South at Yale University. She taught history at Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina before joining the Yale faculty as an assistant professor in 1994. She became a full professor of history in 1998 and in 2001 was named Peter V. & C. Vann Woodward Professor of History. She is also a member of the University's African American studies and American studies departments. Her areas of expertise include: race relations, women's and African-American history, the history of social reform, American religious activism, North Carolina history, the history of prostitution and the political, social and cultural history of the United States in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

A eighth-generation North Carolinian, Gilmore received her B.A. in Psychology from Wake Forest University. She taught high school history in South Carolina for several years and held managerial positions in private industry before returning to school to receive her M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill respectively.

In 1996, Gilmore's doctoral dissertation was published as a book called Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. This book won many awards including the Organization of American Historians' Lerner-Scott Prize, Frederick Jackson Turner Award for the best first book by an author and James A. Rawley Prize for the best book on the history of race relations in the United States. The book also won the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association of Women Historians and the Yale Heyman Prize for junior faculty.

In 2002, Gilmore was drawn into what became a national controversy after writing “Variations on Iraq,” an anti-war opinion piece solicited from her by the Yale Daily News and published on October 11, 2002. In the the piece, Gilmore argued that a preemptive strike on Iraq would be the most craven abdication of democratic principles in our country's history. After a Yale Daily News columnist sent her piece to Daniel Pipes's Campus Watch blog, Gilmore was bombarded with hundreds of hate e-mails. Pipes's blog is controversial and many have compared it to McCarthyism. Andrew Sullivan announced her as the winner of the Susan Sontag award for fuzzy moral thinking and Pipes later hyperbolically labeled her as one of five "professors who hate America."

A popular professor, Gilmore is known to be a compassionate mentor for many undergraduate and graduate students as well as an accomplished scholar. She is currently on sabbatical at the National Humanities Center, finishing her new book Defying Dixie: African Americans at Home and Abroad. The book looks at the radicalism of those who sought to overthrow Jim Crow before the Civil Rights Movement. She is also currently collaborating with Thomas Sugrue on a synthetic reinterpretation of society and politics in twentieth century America.

She is married to noted Cambodian genocide scholar Ben Kiernan