Timothy Patrick McCarthy

Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy
Lecturer on History and Literature

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Timothy Patrick McCarthy is the Director of the Human Rights and Social Movements Program at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also Lecturer on History and Literature and Adjunct Lecturer on Public Policy, and teaches in the undergraduate honors program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

An historian of social movements, Dr. McCarthy graduated with honors from Harvard College and earned his PhD in History from Columbia University, where he completed his dissertation under the direction of Eric Foner. He has published two books— The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition (2003) and Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (2006)—and his third book, Protest Nation: The Radical Roots of Modern America, is forthcoming from the New Press this spring. Dr. McCarthy is currently working on several other book projects, including a study of the relationship between human rights discourse and global social movements. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, In These Times, Journal of American History, Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, Souls, The Sixties: A Journal of History, Culture, and Politics, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, and The Nation, and he is a regular contributor to print, radio, and new media outlets.

An award-winning teacher and advisor, in 2009, Dr. McCarthy received the Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize for Excellence in Senior Thesis Advising and a Special Commendation for Excellence in Teaching at the Harvard Kennedy School. His courses on “American Protest Literature from Tom Paine to Tupac,” “Stories of Slavery and Freedom in the Modern World,” and “The Arts of Communication” are consistently among the most popular and highly rated courses at Harvard.

Dr. McCarthy has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon and Ford Foundations, and Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. From 2003-05, Dr. McCarthy was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study for the American South at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he worked on the first phase of the Long Civil Rights Movement Initiative of the Southern Oral History Program.

In addition to his teaching and research, Dr. McCarthy is a widely respected leader in the fields of education, civil rights, and LGBT advocacy. In 2002-03, and again since fall 2005, he has served as Academic Director of the Clemente Course in the Humanities, a multi-disciplinary college course offered free of charge to low-income adults through the Codman Square Health Center in Dorchester, Massachusetts. As founding director of Harvard’s Alternative Spring Break Church Rebuilding Project, he has spent more than a decade taking groups of students down South to rebuild African-American churches that have been burned in arson attacks. In 2007, he received the Humble Servant Award from the National Coalition for Burned Churches for his ongoing commitment to civil rights, social justice, and racial and religious tolerance. Dr. McCarthy was also a founding member of Barack Obama’s National LGBT Leadership Council, and currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus. In April 2009, he delivered Harvard’s prestigious Nicholas Papadopoulos Lecture, entitled “Stonewall’s Children: Life, Loss, and Love after Liberation,” commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion. Dr. McCarthy lectures widely on topics ranging from history and literature to politics and human rights.

Dr. McCarthy divides his time between Cambridge, MA, where he is a longtime resident of Quincy House, and Brooklyn, NY, where his partner runs a charter elementary school.