Don James McLaughlin earned his Ph.D. in English at the University of Pennsylvania in July 2017. He completed his dissertation under the direction of Heather Love, Max Cavitch, Nancy Bentley, and Chi-ming Yang. The dissertation traces the emergence of the -phobia suffix in American print culture as a medical diagnosis, political metaphor, and aesthetic sensation in the 18th and 19th centuries. In January 2016, an essay from the project was published in The New Republic, titled "The Anti-Slavery Roots of Today's "-Phobia" Obsession." In the summer of 2018, Don James was awarded the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society to support completion of his first book. He joined the English Department at the University of Tulsa as Assistant Professor of English in 2018 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2025.

In and beyond this research, Don James's scholarship focuses on 18th- and 19th-century literary movements in the Americas; the queer past; the history of medicine and psychiatry; disability studies; and affect theory. While a doctoral candidate in 2014, he had the privilege of collaborating with Connie King, Curator of Women's History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, on an exhibit titled "That's So Gay: Outing Early America." The show documented various instances of queer life in early America across an array of materials at LCP, from rare books to bawdy stereographs, comic valentines, and other ephemera. Research for his first monograph has been supported by the Penn Humanities Forum, American Antiquarian Society, a Marguerite Bartlett Hamer Dissertation Fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Mark Twain Center. Entitled Phobia and American Literature, 1705-1937: A Therapeutic History, the book will be published by Oxford University Press in 2025.

In addition, Don James has published a new critical edition of Sarah Orne Jewett's 1885 novel A Marsh Island with the Q19: Queer American Nineteenth-Century Series at Penn Press. A novel Jewett regarded as the "best story" of her career, A Marsh Island explores the formation of queer kinship from the vantage point of a marshscape painter named Dick Dale, during a painting sojourn in the Great Marsh of Massachusetts.