Timothy McCarthy
Dr. Timothy McCarthy is a scholar of media and communications, American race relations, and democratic social movements. Dr. McCarthy graduated with honors from Harvard College in 1993 and earned his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in History from Columbia University.
His research agenda examines the relationship between human rights and social movements in three main areas: race relations and civil rights; LGBT politics and policy; and modern-day slavery and human trafficking.
He is the author of The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition (New Press, 2003) and Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (New Press, 2006) — and his third book, Protest Nation: The Radical Roots of Modern America, is forthcoming from the New Press in 2009.
An award-winning teacher and public servant, Dr. McCarthy also serves as Academic Director of the Bard College Clemente Course in the Humanities, a multidisciplinary college course offered free of charge to low-income adults through the Codman Square Health Center in Dorchester, MA.
As the founding director of Harvard’s Alternative Spring Break Church Rebuilding Project, he has spent the last decade taking groups of students down South to help rebuild black churches that have been burned in arson attacks. In 2007, he was awarded the Humble Servant Award by the National Coalition for Burned Churches for this work.
Dr. McCarthy was a founding member of President-elect Barack Obama’s National LGBT Leadership Council, and currently serves on the Board of the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus. He lectures widely on topics ranging from history and literature to politics and human rights.
Timothy Patrick McCarthy is Adjunct Lecturer on Public Policy and Faculty Research Affiliate at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He also teaches in the undergraduate honors program in History and Literature and serves on the tutorial board of the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
