Van Leer taught at Cornell University and Princeton University, and in 1986 he became Assistant Professor at University of California at Davis to end before retirement as tenure professor. In 2007 he received the Academic Senate Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching. He provided article to magazines like The New Republic and The Times Literary Supplement. His research field was cultural studies, with emphases in lesbian and gay studies, film studies, and multi-ethnic discourse. Other research fields were American cultural and intellectual history 1600-1900, philosophy, literature, and popular American culture from World War I to the present. He served on the Board of Editors of American Quarterly and on the Advisory Board for the Graduate Record Examinations Subject Exam in Literature. He was a book review editor for the Journal of Bisexuality.
Works
Emerson’s Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays.
The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society.
Ed. Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Tales, World’s Classics Series.
View from the Closet: Reconcilable Differences in Douglass and Melville.” Samuel Otter and Robert Levine, eds., Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation
Poe’s Cosmology: The World of the Mind. POEtic Effect and Cultural Discourses, ed. Hermann Josef Schnarkertz. : 189-207
Frank and Jim Go Boating: Henry James and the French New Wave, Henry James on the Stage and Screen, ed. John R Bradley., pp. 84–102.
A World of Female Friendship: The Bostonians, Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire, ed. John R Bradley : 93-109.
Foucault in Gay America: Sexuality at Plymouth Plantation, Cultural History After Foucault, ed. John Neubauer,, pp. 209–219. Reprint of previous essay.
What Lola Got: Cultural Carelessness on Broadway. The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons, ed. Joel Foreman, pp. 171–96.
Visible Silence: Spectatorship in Black Gay and Lesbian Film. Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video, ed. Valerie Smith, pp. 157–81.
The Beast of the Closet: Homosociality and the Pathology of Manhood, Critical Inquiry 15 : 587-605.
Trust and Trade: A Response to Eve Sedgwick, Critical Inquiry 15 : 758-63.
Detecting Truth: The World of the Dupin Tales
Hester's Labyrinth: Transcendental Rhetoric in Puritan Bostons
Personal life
Van Leer was the long-time partner of Robert Miles Parker. While teaching in California, Van Leer traveled periodically to New York City where Parker was living. After retirement Van Leer moved permanently to New York City. He died on April 3, 2013.
