Joe McLaughlin

Joe specializes in the theory and history of the novel in nineteenth- and twentieth- century anglophone literatures. His dissertation, entitled "We Other Authoritarians," traces the persistence of authoritarian fantasies within the Victorian liberal tradition. Challenging master narratives about the democratizing politics of the nineteenth-century novel and seeking to construct an alternative genealogy of radically conservative aesthetics running through the underground of English literary history to our present day, "We Other Authoritarians" helps to elucidate a pivotal and transitory moment in the modern formation of what Michel Foucault tantalizingly termed, in his preface to Anti-Oedipus, "the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior."

In 2025, he received the TATP's TA Teaching Excellence Award, which recognizes graduate students from across the University of Toronto who demonstrate “sustained and ongoing excellence in their teaching,” specifically on the basis of accessibility, equity, and inclusion; quality feedback; student engagement; and a commitment to reflectiveness and pedagogical development.

He is currently writing about violent passion and the idea of human nature in Wuthering Heights.

List of Publications

• "Reading Global Anti-Fascism in 1930s British Publishing: New Writing Magazine Across Formats and Archives," co-authored with Claire Battershill, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 262:2 (Forthcoming, 2025).
• “Queer Families, Queer Futures in Dombey and Son,” Dickens Studies Annual, 2021-03-01, Vol. 52, p. 30-52; Pennsylvania State University Press