Rebecca L. Davis
Selected WorksBooks
Why are Americans so obsessed with marriage?
Journal Articles
American Jewish History 100, no. 1 (January 2016): 25-50.
Journal of American History, 94, no. 4 (March 2008): 1137-1163
Book Chapters
In American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity, edited by Catherine Brekus and W. Clark Gilpin
In The Blackwell Companion to Religion in America, edited by Philip Goff
In The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity, edited by Margaret Kamitsuka |
WelcomeRebecca Davis is a historian of twentieth-century American religion, sexuality, and culture. Her first book, MORE PERFECT UNIONS: THE AMERICAN SEARCH FOR MARITAL BLISS, explores the history of marriage counseling in the United States -- and helps explain both why Americans remain so uniquely obsessed with the pursuit of marital perfection and what that preoccupation means for the culture as a whole. She has a special interest in American religious history and often teaches courses on immigration, race, and ethnicity. In 2017 she became a producer and story editor for Sexing History, a podcast.
She is currently writing a book about how religious conversion exposed contentious ideas about the nature of the self and how much it could change in the postwar United States. Cushwa Center research
Davis describes some of her research finds at the University of Notre Dame Recent WorkRead Rebecca's interpretation in Public Seminar of the Obergefell decision
How marriage, heterosexuality, and religion continue to shape the legal landscape Read Rebecca's Notches blog post with Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, and Heather White
"Believe It: Finding Religion in the History of U.S. Sexuality," notchesblog.com Watch Rebecca discuss Religion, Marriage, and Sexual Counterrevolutions
A lecture given at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, Washington University in St. Louis, May 9, 2014 Winner of the 2011-2012 LGBT Religious History Award from the LGBT Religious Archives Network
For the article "'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" Read Invited Responses to "'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"
Forum presented by the University of Chicago Divinity School More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss
"There could hardly be a more opportune time to have at hand Rebecca Davis's smart, thoughtful, and meticulously-researched new book of social history." -- Bella DePaulo, Living Single blog, PsychologyToday.com |
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