David Van Leer

David Mark Van Leer was born December 26, 1949, in Rockville Centre, New York.[1]

He graduated from Cornell University, Ph.D. 1978, M.A. 1974 and A.B. 1971.[1] He obtained a fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the California Arts Council, and three from the National Endowment for the Humanities.[2]

Van Leer taught at Cornell University and Princeton University, and in 1986 he became Assistant Professor at University of California at Davis to end before retirement as tenure professor.[1]

In 2007 he received the Academic Senate Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching.[2]

He provided article to magazines like The New Republic and The Times Literary Supplement. His research field was cultural studies, with emphases in lesbian and gay studies, film studies, and multi-ethnic discourse.[2]

Other research fields were American cultural and intellectual history 1600-1900, philosophy, literature, and popular American culture from World War I to the present.[2]

He served on the Board of Editors of American Quarterly and on the Advisory Board for the Graduate Record Examinations Subject Exam in Literature (ETS).[2]

He was a book review editor for the Journal of Bisexuality.[2]

• Emerson’s Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).[3]
• The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society (New York: Routledge, 1995).[4]
• Ed. Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Tales, World’s Classics Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).[5]
• 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.
• Detecting Truth: The World of the Dupin Tales (1993)[6]
• Hester's Labyrinth: Transcendental Rhetoric in Puritan Bostons (1985)[7]

Van Leer was the long-time partner of Robert Miles Parker.[1][8] While teaching in California, Van Leer traveled periodically to New York City where Parker was living.[9]

After retirement Van Leer moved permanently to New York City. He died on April 3, 2013.[1]