Rate My Professor Kevin McLaughlin

Kevin McLaughlin is the George Hazard Crooker University Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He also serves as Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study and holds the title of Dean Emeritus of the Faculty. McLaughlin joined Brown in 1996 as an assistant professor of English, received tenure in 2000, was promoted to full professor in 2003, and served as chair of the Department of English from 2005 to 2008 and again from 2009 to 2011. He was appointed Dean of the Faculty in 2011 and completed an extended term in that role in 2022. During his deanship, he collaborated with departments and centers to advance initiatives including the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, and the Center for Slavery and Justice.

McLaughlin earned a BA from Western Maryland College in 1981, an MA from New York University in 1985, and a PhD from New York University in 1989. His research focuses on 19th-century literature and philosophy. He is the author of Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in 19th-Century Literature (Stanford University Press, 1995), Paperwork: Literature and Mass Mediacy in the Age of Paper (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), Poetic Force: Poetry after Kant (Stanford University Press, 2014), and The Philology of Life: Walter Benjamin's Critical Program (Fordham University Press, 2023). He co-translated Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project (Harvard University Press, 1999) with Howard Eiland and co-edited and co-translated Walter Benjamin: On Goethe (Stanford University Press, 2025). McLaughlin has received research grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Program, and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. He is the editor of the journal Novel: A Forum on Fiction and teaches courses on 19th-century Anglo-American and European literature and the writings of Walter Benjamin. His current work includes a project on the 19th-century novel.

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