HCAR Works-in-Progress Seminar: Don James McLaughlin

About the Presenter:

Join us for a brief presentation and roundtable conversation with Professor McLaughlin on his new research project. McLaughlin 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 forthcoming book, 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 & 19th century literary movements in the Americas, the medical humanities, LGBTQ2+ literature, queer health, disability narratives, and the history of emotions.

About the Project:

“‘Inward Irradiations’: r/Romantic Friendship from Amy Matilda Cassey’s Autograph Album to Bayard Taylor’s ‘Twin Love'”

In the nineteenth-century U.S., the concept of romantic friendship describes impassioned bonds shared by friends, often of the same gender, which encouraged an array of physical and emotional intimacies. Romantic friendships are understood to predate modern ideas of same-sex sexuality as a manifestation of orientation and object choice. Concurrently, romantic friendship has come to serve as a transhistorical paradigm, reminding that, across different eras, passionate friendship has long blurred the boundary between the erotic and platonic. A problem arises in these dual valences of contingent specificity and transcendent applicability. While romantic friendship circumvents anachronism in one sense, the term remains ambiguous in another. If, in fact, the zenith of romantic friendship may be said to arrive with the age of artistic Romanticism, it becomes imperative to better understand the meaning of the bond’s distinguishing modifier. When exploring the precise meaning of the relation, we must ask what kind of r/Romance it is, exactly, that forewent and forestalled the solidification of modern identity categories. Seeking clarity on these overlapping r/Romanticisms, this essay explores the convergence of romantic friendship and Romantic aesthetics across an array of nineteenth-century texts. 

Register at Eventbrite link to receive a copy of the paper: http://tiny.cc/eg0s001 

About Works-In-Progress Seminars
These seminars nurture a community of local and regional scholars by providing opportunities to share creative activity in an academically constructive environment.  Each seminar will focus on pre-circulated drafts followed by a roundtable conversation among participants.