The Carr-Ryan Center’s Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights Program is thrilled to announce that the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School has awarded Dr. Timothy Patrick McCarthy a $10,000 Faculty Support Grant to support the design and development of his “Living Queer History Project.”
The Living Queer History Project, which will launch in Fall 2026, is a new online digital archive of oral history interviews with key public leaders in modern LGBTQI+ history: movement activists and community organizers; non-profit, NGO, and philanthropic leaders; elected officials and policymakers at every level; and key legal advocates and human rights defenders. Inspired by student work in Dr. McCarthy’s groundbreaking Harvard course, “Queer Nation: LGBTQI+ Protest, Politics, and Policy in the United States,” the Living Queer History Project has three main objectives:
- To expand access to living historical perspectives in open source, digital form to scholars, teachers, students, and everyday citizens interested in LGBTQI+ people and the roles they have played in movements for freedom and equality, rights and dignity, democratic change and social justice
- To expand the definition and representation of public leadership to include people who have been active in both “inside politics” (elected officials, lawyers, political appointees) and “outside politics” (activists and organizers, cultural workers, human rights defenders)
- To document these intergenerational LGBTQI+ living histories at a time of fierce backlash, growing violence, and cultural erasure.
“The Living Queer History Project seeks to document histories and build bridges at a time of dangerous division,” says McCarthy, Faculty Chair of the Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights Program. “We hope that it will inspire rising generations of public leaders to forge deeper connections between the past, present, and future at a time when all three seem more precarious and perilous than ever. We are so grateful to the Center for Public Leadership for its ongoing support and early investment in the success of this exciting new initiative.”
The CPL Faculty Support Grants at designed to support CPL-affiliated faculty work, from research to pedagogy to programming. Grants are awarded based on need and relevance to CPL’s mission, with a preference to new activities.