Kevin McLaughlin's research focuses on literature and philosophy in the 19th century. He is the author of four books, Writing in Parts:  Imitation and Exchange in 19th-Century Literature (Stanford UP, 1995); Paperwork:  Literature and Mass Mediacy in the Age of Paper (U of Penn P, 2005); Poetic Force: Poetry after Kant (Stanford UP, 2014); and The Philology of Life: Walter Benjamin's Critical Program (Fordham UP, 2022; forthcoming).. He is also co-translator with Howard Eiland of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (Harvard UP, 1999).

Currently, McLaughlin is beginning to work on a new book called Counter-Disciplinarity:  Benjamin, Baudelaire, and the Question of Historical Time. 
 

National Endowment for the Humanities research grant for book-in-progress, Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age , 2002-03

Bronson Research Fellowship, Brown University, Department of English, 1999-2000

National Endowment for the Humanities research grant for English translation of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (co-translator with Howard Eiland), 1994-96

St. John's University Faculty Summer Research Grant, 1995

Poetic Force: Poetry after Kant (Stanford UP, 2014)

"Ur-ability: Force and Image from Kant to Benjamin," Philosophy of the Image, eds. Robert Mitchell and Jacques Khalip (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2011)

"Culture and Messianism: Disinterestedness in Arnold," Victorian Studies 50.4 (Summer, 2008).

"On Poetic Reason of State: Baudelaire and the Multitudes," Partial Answers 5/2 (June 2007).

"Benjamin's Barbarism," Germanic Review. Special Issue on Walter Benjamin. (2006)

Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

"'Images de papier': Deleuze, Benjamin, Melville," Tropismes 12 (Winter, 2004), 245-64.

"Benjamin Now: Afterthoughts on The Arcades Project," boundary 2 30.1 (Spring, 2003), 191-97.

Co-editor of Special Issue of boundary 2 entitled "Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with Benjamin's Arcades Project." boundary 2, 30.1 (Duke University Press, 2003).

"Virtual Paris: Benjamin's Arcades Project." In Benjamin's Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory. Ed. Gerhard Richter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002: 204-25.

"Just Fooling: Notes on Paper in Poe," Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 11.1 (Spring, 1999), 38-67.

"The Coming of Paper: Aesthetic Value from Ruskin to Benjamin," Modern Language Notes 114. 5 (December, 1999), 962-990.

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translation with notes and introduction, (co-translator with Howard Eiland). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999 (paperback edition, 2002)

"The Financial Imp: Ethics and Finance in Nineteenth-Century Fiction," Novel: A Forum on Fiction 29. 2 (Winter, 1996), 165-83.

Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.

"Losing One's Place: Domesticity and Displacement in Dickens's Bleak House," Modern Language Notes 108, 5 (December, 1993), pp. 875-90; Rpt: Critical Approaches to Charles Dickens's Bleak House. New Casebooks Series. Ed. Jeremy Tambling (London: Macmillan, 1998).

National Endowment for the Humanities research grant for book-in-progress, Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age , 2002-03

Bronson Research Fellowship, Brown University, Department of English, 1999-2000

National Endowment for the Humanities research grant for English translation of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (co-translator with Howard Eiland), 1994-96

St. John's University Faculty Summer Research Grant, 1995

Dean's Dissertation Fellowship, New York University, 1987-88

Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Graduate Fellowship (Frankfurt) 1986-87

Fulbright Quadrille Ball Fellowship (Frankfurt), declined, 1986-87

Sidney and Celia Siegel Fellowship in the Humanities, 1984-85

University Developmental Fellowship, New York University, 1982-84

Phi Beta Kappa

Modern Language Association

American Comparative Literature Association

Professor McLaughlin teaches courses on nineteenth-century Anglo-American and European literature: The Novel from Goethe to Proust: The Victorian Novel; Fiction from Dickens to James; Literature and Money in the Age of Paper; Poetry after Kant, and a course on the philosophical and critical writings of Walter Benjamin.

In Fall 2016, Professor McLaughlin offered a graduate seminar on Walter Benjamin's Literary Criticism in the Department of Comparative Literature. In Fall 2017 he co-taught a seminar with Professor Peter Szendy called "What Was Europe?" at the Cogut Center for the Humanities under the umbrella of the Mellon funded initiative on collaborative doctoral studies in the humanities.