Kathleen DuVal (1970–)

Kathleen DuVal is an award-winning historian who was the recipient in 2025 of the Pulitzer Prize in History for her book Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House, 2024).

Kathleen DuVal was born on January 10, 1970, in Jonesboro (Craighead County) to John and Kay DuVal; she has one brother, Niell. She moved to Fayetteville (Washington County) when her parents began graduate work at the University of Arkansas (UA). She grew up in Fayetteville, attending Leverett Elementary, Woodland Junior High, and Fayetteville High School. After graduating in 1988, she headed to the West Coast for college, earning a BA in history and political science from Stanford University.

After earning her PhD in history at the University of California, Davis, DuVal held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies for two years before joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill in 2003. She was Carl W. Ernst Distinguished Professor of History at UNC from 2003 to 2009, when she received tenure and became an associate professor. In 2015, she was promoted to full professor, and she served as Bowman and Gordon Gray Term Professor from 2016 to 2021. In 2024, she became the Carl W. Ernst Distinguished Professor while also holding an additional faculty appointment in American Indian and Indigenous Studies in the Department of American Studies.

DuVal’s The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) was awarded the J. G. Ragsdale Book Award for best book on Arkansas history from the Arkansas Historical Association. She served as the co-editor with her father, literary translator and retired University of Arkansas professor John DuVal, of Interpreting a Continent: Voices from Colonial America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). In 2015, she published Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (Random House), which viewed the American Revolution from the frontiers of Spanish Louisiana and British West Florida. The book received awards from the Journal of the American Revolution, the Summersell Center for the Study of the South, and the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey; it was also a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. In 2022, she joined historian Eric Foner to edit the seventh edition of his highly regarded U.S. history textbook Give Me Liberty! She also co-edited the eighth edition (2025).

In addition to being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America was also the winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Cundill History Prize. The reviewer at the Wall Street Journal wrote that in “examining both past and present from an indigenous rather than a European perspective, DuVal fuses a millennium of Native American history into a thought-provoking, persuasive whole,” while the New York Review of Books praised the work as “a magisterial overview of a thousand years of Native American history.” The Pulitzer Prize board called the book “a panoramic portrait of Native American nations and communities over a thousand years, a vivid and accessible account of their endurance, ingenuity and achievement in the face of conflict and dispossession,” while the Bancroft Prize jurors called the work “a seamless panorama of 1,000 years of American history,” adding that she had “crafted a historical narrative that introduces readers to a new national story,” one that “helps explain the Indigenous cultural and political renaissance of our own age.”

DuVal has had articles published in the William and Mary Quarterly, the Atlantic, Time magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times, and she is also a regular book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. Her articles on Arkansas-specific history have appeared in the Journal of the Early Republic, the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, and Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She has won a prize for the best article in the William and Mary Quarterly as well as one for the best article in southern women’s history from the Southern Association for Women Historians. DuVal has earned fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the American Philosophical Society, the Huntington Library, and the Newberry Library.

DuVal was one of the historians providing commentary in documentarian Ken Burns’s The American Revolution, which premiered in November 2025. She says that while she had contributed to a number of other documentaries, the response to her appearance in the widely viewed Burns work was like nothing she had ever previously experienced.

DuVal is married to Martin Smith, an environmental economist who works at Duke University. The couple, who met at Stanford, have two sons, Quentin and Calvin. The family lives in Durham, North Carolina.

For additional information:
“Dr. Kathleen DuVal.” Fayetteville Public Education Foundation https://www.fayedfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Kathleen-DuVal.pdf (accessed March 5, 2026).

Kathleen DuVal. https://kathleenduval.net/ (accessed March 5, 2026).

Kathleen DuVal. https://history.unc.edu/person/kathleen-duval/ (accessed March 5, 2026).

Link, Allesandra. “Rethinking American Independence: An Interview with Kathleen DuVal.” Erstwhile: A History Blog, September 2, 2015. https://erstwhileblog.com/2015/09/02/rethinking-american-independence-an-interview-with-kathleen-duval/ (accessed March 5, 2026).

William H. Pruden III
Raleigh, North Carolina