David Van Leer


David Van Leer was an award winning American educator and LGBT cultural studies researcher.

Early life

David Mark Van Leer was born December 26, 1949, in Rockville Centre, New York, and is a member of the Van Leer Family.
He graduated from Cornell University, Ph.D. 1978, M.A. 1974 and A.B. 1971. He was a recipient of a Donald Stauffer Preceptorship. He obtained fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the California Arts Council, and three from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Career

Van Leer taught at Cornell University and Princeton University, and in 1986 he became Assistant Professor at University of California at Davis and retired as a tenured professor.
In 2007 he received the Academic Senate Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching.
He provided articles 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.
Other research fields were American cultural and intellectual history 1600-1900, philosophy, literature, and popular American culture from World War I to the present.
He served on the Board of Editors of American Quarterly and on the Advisory Board for the Graduate Record Examinations Subject Exam in Literature.
He was a book review editor for the Journal of Bisexuality.
He received a UC Chancellor’s Citation for Diversity, and Deems Taylor Prize in Music Criticism, and Academic Senate Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching. Van Leer was also praised by students and the majority of the Davis community for his contributions.

Personal life

Van Leer had a long-time spouse who he referred to as his partner Robert Miles Parker. Parker was the founder of Save Our Heritage Organisation. While teaching in California, Van Leer traveled periodically to New York City where Parker was living. Van Leer was known to be a fine pianist and conductor, frequently conducting the “Grand Symphonious Orchestra” in Gilbert and Sullivan.
After retirement Van Leer moved permanently to New York City. He died on April 3, 2013.

Works

  • Emerson’s Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays.
  • The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society.
  • Ed. Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Tales, World’s Classics Series.
  • View from the Closet: Reconcilable Differences in Douglass and Melville. Samuel Otter and Robert Levine, eds., Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation
  • Lesbian and Gay Theory / Queer Theory. Modern North American Criticism and Theory, ed. Julian Wolfreys.
  • Poe’s Cosmology: The World of the Mind. POEtic Effect and Cultural Discourses, ed. Hermann Josef Schnarkertz. : 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., pp. 84–102.
  • A World of Female Friendship: The Bostonians, Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire, ed. John R Bradley : 93-109.
  • Foucault in Gay America: Sexuality at Plymouth Plantation, Cultural History After Foucault, ed. John Neubauer,, pp. 209–219. Reprint of previous essay.
  • What Lola Got: Cultural Carelessness on Broadway. The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons, ed. Joel Foreman, pp. 171–96.
  • Visible Silence: Spectatorship in Black Gay and Lesbian Film. Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video, ed. Valerie Smith, pp. 157–81.
  • The Beast of the Closet: Homosociality and the Pathology of Manhood, Critical Inquiry 15 : 587-605.
  • Trust and Trade: A Response to Eve Sedgwick, Critical Inquiry 15 : 758-63.
  • Detecting Truth: The World of the Dupin Tales
  • Hester's Labyrinth: Transcendental Rhetoric in Puritan Bostons