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David Van Leer Professor of English 2007Recipient of the Academic Senate Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching

Ph.D. Cornell University, 1978
M.A. Cornell University, 1974
A.B. Cornell University, 1971

Professor Van Leer Joined the UC Davis faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1986. Before coming to Davis, he taught at Cornell and Princeton Universities. Writing widely on American culture for both academic publishers and magazines like The New Republic and The Times Literary Supplement, his primary research is in cultural studies, with special emphases in lesbian and gay studies, film studies, and multi-ethnic discourse. As an intellectual historian, he also works in American cultural and intellectual history 1600-1900, philosophy and literature, and popular American culture from World War I to the present. He has served on the Board of Editors of American Quarterly and the Advisory Board for the GRE Subject Exam in Literature (ETS); he is currently book review editor for the Journal of Bisexuality. He has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the California Council of the Arts, and three from the National Endowment of the Humanities.

Publication Spotlight

The Queening of America by David Van Leer Since at least the end of the nineteenth century, gay culture -- its humor, its icons, its desires -- has been alive and sometimes even visible in the midst of straight American society. David Van Leer puts forward here a series of readings that aim to identify what he calls the``queening'' of America, a process by which ``rhetorics and situations specific to homosexual culture are presented to a general readership as if culturally neutral.'' In his reconsiderations of the all-American Damn Yankees or the gay adult classics of Patrick Dennis (Auntie Mame, Little Me), Van Leer overturns simplistic notions of camp as merely a humorous exaggeration of straight culture.

Publications (selected)

• Emerson’s Epistemology:  The Argument of the Essays (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1986).
• The Queening of America:  Gay Culture in Straight Society (New York:  Routledge, 1995).
• Ed.  Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Tales, World’s Classics Series (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1998).
• View from the Closet: Reconcilable Differences in Douglass and Melville.”  Samuel Otter and Robert Levine, eds.,  Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation (2007)
• Lesbian and Gay Theory / Queer Theory.”   Modern North American Criticism and Theory, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006).
• Poe’s Cosmology: The World of the Mind.”  POEtic Effect and Cultural Discourses, ed. Hermann Josef Schnarkertz.  (Universitätsverlag WINTER Heidelberg, 2003): 189-207
• Frank and Jim Go Boating:  Henry James and the French New Wave,” Henry James on the Stage and Screen, ed. John R Bradley. (Houndmills, Basingstoke, and New York:  Palgrave / St Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 84-102.
• “A World of Female Friendship:  The Bostonians,”  Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire, ed. John R Bradley  (London and New York:  Macmillan Press, St Martin’s Press, 1999): 93-109.
• “Foucault in Gay America: Sexuality at Plymouth Plantation,”  Cultural History After Foucault, ed. John Neubauer,  (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1999), pp. 209-219.  Reprint of previous essay.
• “What Lola Got:  Cultural Carelessness on Broadway.”   The Other Fifties:  Interrogating Midcentury American Icons, ed. Joel Foreman (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. 171-96.
• “Visible Silence:  Spectatorship in Black Gay and Lesbian Film.”  Representing Blackness:  Issues in Film and Video, ed. Valerie Smith (New Brunswick, N.J.:  Rutgers University Press, 1997), pp. 157-81.
• “The Beast of the Closet:  Homosociality and the Pathology of Manhood,” Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 587-605.    “Trust and Trade:  A Response to Eve Sedgwick,” Critical Inquiry 15 (Summer 1989): 758-63.