About
Don James McLaughlin, Ph.D., is an associate 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 & Honors
- Maine Women Writers Collection Research Grant, University of New England, Portland, ME, 2024-25
- Grant Awardee: “Aggressive Glamour: The History of Drag in San Francisco.” A Conversation with Honey Mahogany for the Twisted Arts LGBTQ2+ Film Festival at Circle Cinema, Oklahoma Humanities, 2022
- Essay Contest Winner: “Charity and Sylvia’s Adult Cradle: A Crip Queer Method for Early American Studies,” Society for Early Americanists, 2022
- Eight-Week Fellowship, New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, 2020-22
- Houghton Library, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Public Library
- Two-Month Fellowship, John Carter Brown Library, Awarded 2019-20; Fulfilled 2021-22
- Rising Scholar Prize, Honorable Mention: “In Defense of Miasma: Microscopic Myopia in Rebecca Harding Davis and Fitz-James O’Brien’s ‘The Diamond Lens’”, C19 Society, 2020
- Quarry Farm Fellowship, Center for Mark Twain Studies, 2019
- First Book Institute Fellowship, Penn State University, State College, PA, 2019
- Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, 2018-19
- Diane Hunter Prize for Best Dissertation in English, University of Pennsylvania, 2018
- Dissertation Fellowship, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, 2015-16
- William Patrick Day Essay Prize for Best Essay Submitted During 2013-14 Academic Year: “Reading for Color-Phobia,” University of Pennsylvania, 2014
- Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Graduate Student, University of Pennsylvania, 2013
Education
- Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
- M.A., Villanova University
- B.A., Harding University
Research Interests & Areas of Expertise
- 18th- and 19th-century literature in the Americas
- History of medicine and psychiatry
- LGBTQ2+ literature
- The queer past
- Disability studies
- Affect theory
