Lauren Duval is an assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. She is historian of early North America and the Atlantic World, specializing in women’s and gender history and the era of the American Revolution. She earned her PhD from American University in Washington, D.C.

Her first book, The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence (2025) 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, as war eroded social norms and fractured the institutions that structured daily life, households in occupied regions became war zones, with dissimilar consequences for their assorted residents. Integrating these varied, often contradictory 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.

Duval has published an award-winning article, “Mastering Charleston: Property and Patriarchy in British-Occupied Charleston, 1780-82,” in the William and Mary Quarterly, as well as contributing chapters to three volumes about the American Revolution: Women Waging War in the American Revolution (UVA 2022), The Revolution at 250 (UVA 2026), and 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.

As a Gibson Fellow at the Karsh Institute, she will be researching a new book project about motherhood and reproduction during the American Revolution.

Jane Kamensky is president and CEO of Monticello/The Thomas Jefferson Foundation. A leading historian of early America and the United States, she earned her BA (1985) and PhD (1993) in history from Yale University. For 30 years, she worked as a professor and higher education leader, most recently as Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University and Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. 

Kamensky is the author or editor of numerous books, including A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (2016), which won four major prizes and was a finalist for several others; and the authoritative Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, co-edited with the late Edward G. Gray. Her most recent book, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. A former Commissioner of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and past Trustee of the Museum of the American Revolution, Kamensky serves as a member of the National Advisory Council of More Perfect, and as one of the principal investigators on the NEH/ Department of Education-funded initiative, Educating for American Democracy, among many other public history roles. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the NEH, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others, and she is an elected fellow of the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Society of American Historians.