Timothy Patrick McCarthy

Timothy Patrick McCarthy AB '93 is an award-winning scholar, educator, and public servant. He holds a joint faculty appointment in the Graduate School of Education and the John F. Kennedy School of Government. His courses—“American Protest Literature,” “Stories of Slavery and Freedom,” and “Arts of Communication”—are consistently among the most popular and highly rated at Harvard. Tim is also the Stanley Paterson Professor of American History in the Boston Clemente Course in Dorchester, Massachusetts, a free college humanities course for low-income adults and co-recipient of the 2015 National Humanities Medal. A historian of politics and social movements, protest literature, and media culture, Tim is the author or editor of five books with the New Press, including The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition (2003), Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (2006), and Stonewall's Children: Living History in the Age of Liberation, Loss, and Love (2017). He is currently working on his first play, Four Harriets, in development with the American Repertory Theater, where he hosts and directs “A.R.T. of Human Rights,” a groundbreaking public series that explores the relationship between art and social change. A frequent media commentator, Tim (@DrTPM on Twitter) is featured in several documentary films, has appeared on NPR, BBC, CBS News, Air America, Bloomberg Radio, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now!, HuffPost Live, and Big Think, and has published essays in The Daily Beast, Salon, Boston Globe, Huffington Post, and The Nation. He has also served as an advisor on numerous political campaigns, including the Presidential campaigns of Barack Obama (2008) and Hillary Clinton (2016). He graduated with honors in History and Literature from Harvard College, earned his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society, National Endowment for the Humanities, Mellon and Ford Foundations, and Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. Tim and his husband, CJ Crowder, live in Quincy House, where they have been Resident Scholars since 2010.