Don James McLaughlin is a PhD Candidate in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is preparing to defend a dissertation titled “Infectious Affect: The Phobic Imagination in American Literature.” His writing has appeared in American Literature, the New Republic, and Legacies, the Magazine of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Areas of academic interest include queer philology, the history of emotions, the medical humanities, and early American histories of gender and sexuality.