Lauren Duval is a historian of early North America and the Atlantic World, specializing in the era of the American Revolution, women’s and gender history, and family history.
Her first book, The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence (Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2025), examines the American Revolution and its aftermath from the vantage points of households in British-occupied cities (Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah). Capturing daily life during the Revolution through the eyes and ears of those who intimately experienced it, The Home Front shows how men and women of all races, statuses, and states of freedom understood the war’s implications for their lives, families, and the nascent American republic.
The Home Front was a co-winner for the 2026 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) Book Prize, awarded to the book that makes the best primary scholarly contribution to the history of the early American Republic. It has also been awarded the 2026 SHEAR Mary Kelley Prize in Gender and Women’s History, honoring the best book published on the history of women, gender, or sexuality in the Early American Republic, as well as the 2026 Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award for a First Book. It also received the Honorable Mention for the 2026 James Kirby Martin Book Prize, which recognizes the best book of the year about the history of the American Revolution.
She has also published an award-winning article, “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. Her work has also appeared in Women Waging War in the American Revolution (UVA, 2022), The Cambridge History of the American Revolution (Cambridge, 2026), and The American Revolution at 250 (UVA, 2026). Carrying forward her interest in family histories of the founding era, her current book project examines motherhood, pregnancy, and parenting during 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, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia. Dr. Duval earned her PhD from American University in Washington, DC.
Dr. Duval currently serves as the book review editor for the Journal of Women’s History and teaches courses on colonial North America and the Atlantic World, the American Revolution, early American women’s and gender history, and public history.
