Don James McLaughlin MA '09 Publishes New Book

Don James McLaughlin, who graduated from the Villanova MA program in 2009, has just published Phobia and American Literature, 1705-1937: A Therapeutic History with Oxford University Press. 

Per Don James's website, "Phobia and American Literature, 1705-1937: A Therapeutic History provides an intellectual history to explain how phobia first came to prominence as a medical diagnosis, political analytic, and aesthetic sensibility in American print cultures." The book "demonstrates how in the early 1800s a phobic imagination emerged by way of an experimental comparison integrating understandings of infectious disease and psychopathology: rabies and racism." The book goes on to analyze "how phobia evolved into a framework for exploring myriad themes, including the relationship between individual psychology and social injustice, the benefits and limits of empathy as a mode of political engagement, and various functions of fear as an affective force in civil society."

Don James was awarded his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in July 2017. While at Penn, he was awarded the Diane Hunter Prize for his dissertation Infectious Affect: The Phobic Imagination in American Literature. Don James held a Visiting Assistant Professorship in English at Swarthmore College in 2017-2018. Following this appointment, he accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professorship in 19th-Century American Literature at the University of Tulsa, where he continues to teach to this day. 

For more information on Don James and his book, you can visit his website!