Rebecca L. Davis specializes in the histories of gender, sexuality, and religion in the United States. 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. In her academic research and teaching, Professor Davis is especially interested in the moments when private thoughts, behaviors, and beliefs become part of a public conversation, whether those ideas concern ideals of marriage, sex, faith, identity, or politics. She is the author of More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss (Harvard University Press, 2010) and of Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). In addition, with Dr. Michele Mitchell, she is co-editor of Heterosexual Histories (New York University Press, 2021). Her current book project is a single-volume history of sex in America, with Liveright Press.

Prof. Davis is a 2011-2012 recipient 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.” She is a producer of the Sexing History podcast, a research associate of the Council on Contemporary Families, and a member of the Scholarly Advisory Board of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.​

"This Is Probably a Really Weird Questions" is a new podcast co-created by Davis and Ronni Hayon, a family physician. Davis and Hayon met at sleep-away summer camp when they were 16 years old, and they have been having conversations about sex and justice ever since. This podcase shares the insights they gain from one another's respective areas of expertise with a wide public. www.reallyweirdquestion.com.