Participant Info

First Name
Lauren
Last Name
Duval
Country
United States
State
Affiliation
University of Oklahoma
Website URL
Keywords
Early America, American Revolution, Women's History, Gender History, Military Occupation, Household and Domesticity
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I’m a historian of early North America and the Atlantic World, specializing in women’s and gender history, the era of the American Revolution, and public history. I’m currently an assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and earned my PhD from American University in Washington, DC.

My first book, The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence, will be published by the Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press in 2025. The Home Front narrates the American Revolution and its aftermath from the vantage point 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.

 My research has been supported by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, the David Library of the American Revolution, the Massachusetts Historical Society-NEH, and the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia. 

Recent Publications

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Book

The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence (Omohundro Institute and UNC, 2025)

Articles and Chapters

“‘a shocking thing to tell of’: Female Civilians, Violence, and Rape under British Military Rule,” in Women Waging War in the American Revolution, ed. Holly Mayer, (University of Virginia Press, 2022), 76–97.

“Mastering Charleston: Property and Patriarchy in British-Occupied Charleston, 1780-82,” William & Mary Quarterly 75, no. 4 (October 2018).

  • Awarded the 2018 Richard L. Morton Award for a distinguished WMQ article by a graduate student
  • Awarded the 2019 Nupur Chaudhuri First Article Prize by Coordinating Council for Women in History

Blog Posts:

“Women’s Everyday Experiences of War during the American Revolution,” The Panorama: Expansive Views from the Journal of the Early Republic.

“Rendezvous at the Lines: The Murray Family During the Siege of Boston,” The Beehive (Massachusetts Historical Society), February 25, 2021,

“Women also Know Loyalists,” Borealia Early Canadian History.

“Women also Know Revolution,” Borealia Early Canadian History.

“Domestic Tranquility: Privacy and the Household in Revolutionary America,” Uncommon Sense—The Blog, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.

Media Coverage
Country Focus
United States
Expertise by Geography
Atlantic, North America, United States
Expertise by Chronology
18th century
Expertise by Topic
American Revolution, American Founding Era, Gender, Military, Public History, Women