Lauren Duval is a historian of early North America and the Atlantic World, specializing in women’s and gender history and the era of the American Revolution.
She is currently completing her first book, The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence, which is under contract with the Omohundro Institute Press. The Home Front narrates the American Revolution and its aftermath from the vantage points of households in British-occupied cities (Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah). During the Revolution, households in occupied regions became war zones, with dissimilar consequences for their assorted residents. As war eroded social norms and fractured the institutions that structured daily life, gender, race, class, marital status, and enslavement shaped individuals’ responses to the opportunities and dangers that British occupation introduced into urban communities. Integrating these varied, often contradictory wartime experiences, The Home Front exposes the importance of the household as a site of wartime violence and as an additional front in the War for American Independence.
She has published an article from this project, “Mastering Charleston: Property and Patriarchy in British-Occupied Charleston, 1780-82,” in the William and Mary Quarterly, which received the journal’s 2018 Richard L. Morton Award and the Coordinating Council for Women in History’s Nupur Chaudhuri First Article Prize. She also has published chapters in Women Waging War in the American Revolution (UVA 2022) as well as the forthcoming Cambridge History of the American Revolution.
Her research has been supported by fellowships from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the New York Public Library, the David Library of the American Revolution, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Dr. Duval earned her PhD from American University in Washington, DC.
Dr. Duval teaches courses on colonial North America and the Atlantic World, the American Revolution, and early American women’s and gender history.
