Don James McLaughlin, Ph.D.

About

Don James McLaughlin, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of 19th-century American literature at The University of Tulsa. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. in English from Villanova University. His book manuscript, “Reading Phobias: The Therapeutic Imagination in American Liberalism,” traces the emergence of the -phobia suffix in early American and 19th-century print culture as a medical diagnosis, political metaphor, and aesthetic sensation.

McLaughlin’s scholarship focuses on 18th- and 19th-century literary movements in the Americas, the medical humanities, LGBTQ2+ literature, queer health, disability narratives, and the history of emotions. Research for his first book has been supported by a Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society, a Marguerite Bartlett Hamer Dissertation Fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the John Carter Brown Library, the Center for Mark Twain Studies, the First Book Institute at the Center for American Literary Studies at Penn State, and the Penn Humanities Forum. He recently finished a critical edition of “A Marsh Island” (1885) by Sarah Orne Jewett, published by Penn Press in June 2023, a project supported by a New England Regional Fellowship Consortium grant sponsoring research at the Massachusetts Historical Society and Houghton Library. His writing has been published in American Literature, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Literature and Medicine, American Literary History, Legacies: The Magazine of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and The New Republic. An excerpt from his second book project on queer disability history appeared in the 2022 Cambridge UP volume “American Literature in Transition, 1770-1828.” He has essays forthcoming in the “Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman” and the “Cambridge History of Queer American Literature.”

Awards and Honors

• Maine Women Writers Collection Research Grant, University of New England, Portland, ME (2024-25)
• Oklahoma Humanities Grant Awardee: “Aggressive Glamour: The History of Drag in San Francisco.” A Conversation with Honey Mahogany. Twisted Arts LGBTQ2+ Film Festival, Circle Cinema, Tulsa, OK (2022)
• Society for Early Americanists Essay Contest Winner: “Charity and Sylvia’s Adult Cradle: A Crip Queer Method for Early American Studies” (Announced February 2022)
• New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, Eight-Week Fellowship (2020-22)
• Houghton Library, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Public Library
• John Carter Brown Library, Two-Month Fellowship (Awarded 2019-20; Fulfilled 2021-22)
• C19 Society Rising Scholar Prize, Honorable Mention: “In Defense of Miasma: Microscopic Myopia in Rebecca Harding Davis and Fitz-James O’Brien’s ‘The Diamond Lens’” (2020)
• Quarry Farm Fellowship, Center for Mark Twain Studies (2019)
• First Book Institute Fellowship, Penn State University, State College, PA (2019)
• American Antiquarian Society, Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship (2018-19)
• Diane Hunter Prize for Best Dissertation in English at the University of Pennsylvania (2018)
• McNeil Center for Early American Studies Dissertation Fellowship (2015-16)
• William Patrick Day Essay Prize (2014), awarded by Penn English for best essay submitted during the 2013-14 academic year: “Reading for Color-Phobia”
• Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Graduate Student, UPenn (2013)