The third 2025-2026 David Center for the American Revolution Seminar will take place February 25th 2025 at 3:00 p.m. ET on Zoom.
The speaker will be Emilee N.K. Robbins. Emilee is a PhD Candidate in the department of History at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro studying the lives of loyalist and émigré women during the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. She has presented her research at several conferences including the Society of Historians of Early American Republic Annual Conference, The Consortium of the Revolutionary Era, and will present at American Historical Association Meeting in 2026. Additionally, she is heavily invested in public history work, serving as a museum docent at Burwell Historic House in Hillsborough, North Carolina and has developed an online exhibit titled “Mapping Revolution in North Carolina.”
The paper will be pre-circulated to registered participants in advance of the seminar meeting.
To attend the seminar and to receive a copy of the paper, please register via Zoom.
The David Center for the American Revolution Seminar serves as a forum for works-in-progress that explore topics in the era of the American Revolution (1750-1820). Questions about the series may be directed to Brenna Holland, Assistant Director of Library & Museum Programs, at [email protected].
NOTE: Seminars are designed as spaces for sharing ideas and works still in-progress. For this reason, this event will not be recorded.
Memoir of Elizabeth Munro Fisher: A Loyalist Mother
I will present a chapter of my current dissertation focused on loyalist Elizabeth Munro Fisher and her memoir. Fisher’s narrative offers a glimpse into the life of loyalist women during the American Revolution as well as the role of print culture in the aftermath of the conflict. My dissertation, currently titled “Through Her Own Words: An Analysis of Women’s Memoirs in the Revolutionary Atlantic World,” brings the methodology of both historical and literary scholars together to demonstrate the ways print culture in the long eighteenth century presented women with a way to earn money, assert political and social critiques, and reimagine their public identities in a post-revolutionary world.
I center the dissertation around the lives of three women and their published memoirs: Elizabeth Fisher (a loyalist during the American Revolution), Margaret Coghlan (a loyalist during the American Revolution), and Henriette de la Tour du Pin (émigré during the French Revolution). The women detail their struggles as revolutionary refugees while balancing the growing domestic expectations of mothers. I identify the ways novels and the rise of female readership influenced the ways each woman conveyed her narrative through the written word. Common literary genres- such as amorous fiction and gothic fiction- offered women new language to better conceptualize their lived experiences in autobiographical form.