Rebecca L. Davis is an associate professor of history and holds a joint appointment in the department of women and gender studies. She specializes in U.S. history since the Civil War, with a particular focus on histories of gender, sexuality, religion, and race. In her sophomore seminar, “American Ethnic Identities,” her students interpret material culture objects as well as written sources to explain how ideas about ethnicity and race have changed over time in the United States. The class culminates in the creation of a website. Davis earned her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in history from Yale and has held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton. She is author of More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss (Harvard University Press, 2010) and Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics (UNC Press, forthcoming fall 2021). She is co-editor of Heterosexual Histories (NYU Press, 2021). Davis serves as a producer and story editor for the podcast Sexing History.
