As a Gibson Fellow in Democracy, Lauren Duval is helping to develop and contribute to the Karsh Institute’s public programming linked to the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence in 2026. 

Duval is an assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. She 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 earned her PhD from American University in Washington, D.C. 

Her first book is The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence (Omohundro Institute Press, 2025). 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, 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. 

She 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, Duval is researching a new book project about motherhood and reproduction during the American Revolution.