of Victoria
BA (Columbia), MA, PhD (Berkeley)
American History, History of Sexuality and LGBTQ2S+ History, Food History
Spring 2024: Monday and Thursday 11:30 - 12:30 or by appointment
My love for American history emerged from traveling throughout the United States when I was a teenager. I have visited every state except Missouri (happy to accept invitations, especially if they involve bbq). I grew up and went to college in New York City, moved to Berkeley, California for graduate school, then taught for four years in Northern Illinois before joining the faculty at UVic in 2009. My next book, Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex will be published by Polity Press in November in the UK, and early 2025 in North America. I am currently working on a project titled “To Russia with Love: A True Story of Sex, Spycraft and Stolen Diamonds.
Research website: rachelhopecleves.com
Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality (University of Chicago Press, 2020)
Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2014)
The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Guest-Editor (along with Averill Earls and Nicholas Syrett): “Intergenerational Sex” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques Special Issue (Spring 2020)
guest editor for “Beyond the Binaries: Critical Approaches to Sex and Gender” Early American Studies Special Issue (Fall 2014)
Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche: Queer Food and Gendered Nationalism in the Late Twentieth-Century USA,” Gender & History (August 2022): 1-18
“A ‘Queer Collection’: The Anglo Colony in Florence, 1840s – 1950s,” Queer Lives Across Britain, ed. Alison Oram, Matt Cook, Justin Bengry (Bloomsbury Press, 2022)
“Vocabula Amatoria: A Glossary of French Culinary Sex Terms,” American Historical Review (October 2020)
“The Erotic Poetry of Begué’s Breakfast Register,” Victorian Review (Summer 2020): 187-191
“The Problem of Modern Pederasty in Queer History: A Case Study of Norman Douglas,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, (Spring 2020): 47-61
““Companions in labor: Love, Work, and Same-Sex Marriage in the Early United States” in Courtship, Marriage and Marriage Breakdown: Intimate Relations in Historical Context, eds. Katie Barclay, Andrea Thomson and Jeff Meeks (Routledge, 2019) 81-95
““Those Were Dirty Words”: Women, Pleasure, and the History of Food Porn,” Global Humanities, Vol 6 (2019): 15-32
“Teddy Wolfe’s Beautiful Boys,” in ed. Chris Brickell and Judith Collard, Queer Objects (Rutgers University Press, 2019): 89-93
“Six Ways of Looking at a Trans Man: The Life of Frank Shimer, 1826-1901” The Journal of the History of Sexuality (January 2018): 32-62
“Same-Sex Love Among Early American Women,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (Oxford University Press, 2018)
“Revolutionary Sexualities and Early National Genders (1770s-1840s),” in The Routledge History of Queer America (Routledge, 2018): 27-38“Philotes in the Kitchen: Norman Douglas’s Friendships with Faith Compton Mackenzie, Elizabeth David, Theodora FitzGibbon and Sybille Bedford” in Norman Douglas: 9.Symposium Bregenz und Thüringen/Vorarlberg 2016 (Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek, 2017) 81-91
“From Pederasty to Pedophilia: Sex Involving Children and Youth in U.S. History,” History Compass (December 2017): 1-9
“‘What, Another Female Husband?’: The Pre-History of Same-Sex Marriage in America” Journal of American History (forthcoming, March 2015)
“Beyond the Binaries in Early America: Special Issue Introduction,” Early American Studies (Fall 2014): 459-468
“A Field of Possibilities: Erotic Variation in Early America” William and Mary Quarterly (July 2013): 581-590.
“Interchange: The War of 1812 and the Creation of the American Republic” [contributor] Journal of American History (September 2012): 520-555.
“Battling the Slaveholders’ ‘Reign of Terror’: Anti-Jacobinism and Abolitionism in the Early American Republic” Annales Historiques de la Revolution Francaise (March 2011)
“‘Savage Barbarities!’: Slavery, Race, and the Uncivilizing Process in the United States” Christa Buschendorf and Astrid Franke, eds. American (De)Civilizing Processes (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011) 103-122.
"'Hurtful to the State': The Political Morality of Federalist Antislavery" John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason, eds. Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation (University of Virginia Press, 2011) 207-226.
“Transatlantic Revolution, National Identity, and American Exceptionalism in the Early Republic” Reviews in American History (December 2011): 607-616.
“‘Heedless Youth’: The Revolutionary War Poetry of Ruth Bryant, 1760-1783” The William and Mary Quarterly (July 2010): 519-548.
“‘Jacobins in this Country’: The United States and the Transatlantic Language of Anti-Jacobinism” Early American Studies (May 2010):410-445.
“On Writing the History of Violence” Journal of the Early Republic (Winter 2004): 641-665.