Rebecca L. Davis specializes in the histories of gender, sexuality, religion, and ethnicity in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries. She received her B.A. in 1998 and her Ph.D. in 2006, both from Yale University. Before joining UD’s history department in the fall of 2007, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton’s Center for the Study for Religion. Her article, “‘Not Marriage at All, but Simple Harlotry’: The Companionate Marriage Controversy,” was published in the March 2008 issue of the Journal of American History. She is the author of More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss (Harvard University Press, 2010).

Prof. Davis is one of the 2011-2012 recipients of the LGBT Religious History Award from the LGBT Religious Archives Network, for her essay, “’My Homosexuality Is Getting Worse Every Day‘: Norman Vincent Peale, Psychiatry, and the Liberal Protestant Response to Same-Sex Desires in Mid-Twentieth-Century America.”