Timothy McCarthy, Adjunct Lecturer on Public Policy Program Director Carr Center for Human Rights Policy

Timothy Patrick McCarthy holds a joint faculty appointment in Harvard's undergraduate honors program in History and Literature and at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he is founding director of the Sexuality, Gender & Human Rights Program at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He is also the Stanley Paterson Professor of American History in the Boston Clemente Course in the Humanities in Dorchester, Massachusetts. A historian of politics and social movements, Dr. McCarthy is the author or editor of five books: The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition (2003); Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (2006); Protest Nation: Words That Inspired a Century of American Radicalism (2010); The Indispensable Zinn: The Essential Writings of The People’s Historian (2012); and Stonewall's Children: Living Queer History in the Age of Liberation, Loss, and Love, forthcoming from the New Press in 2015.

Educated at Harvard College and Columbia University, where he earned his Ph.D. in History, he is an award-winning scholar, teacher, and public servant whose research focuses on slavery and abolition in the modern world; media and communications; human rights and social movements; race, gender, and sexuality; and American protest literature and the radical tradition. A national leader in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community, he was a founding member of Barack Obama’s National LGBT Leadership Council, has given expert testimony to the Pentagon Comprehensive Working Group on the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” serves on the advisory boards of the Harvard Gender and Sexuality Caucus and the Harvey Milk Foundation, and was part of a cohort of academics and activists to receive a 3-year, $1.1 million grant from the Ford Foundation (2010-2013) to study the root causes of LGBT stigma. Dr, McCarthy is a frequent media commentator who has been featured in several documentary films, has appeared on Air America, BBC, Bloomberg Radio, NPR, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now! and Big Think, and has written for The Daily Beast, The Nation, The Huffington Post, In These Times, Boston Globe, and other publications. In collaboration with the American Repertory Theater's National Civil War Project, Dr. McCarthy is currently working on his first play, Four Harriets. Last June, he was artist-in-residence at The Orchard Project. In 2014-2015, McCarthy is the host and director of "The A.R.T. of Human Rights," a groundbreaking new collaboration between the A.R.T. and the Carr Center that uses the arts and the humanities to explore some of the most pressing human rights issues of our time.

Research Assistant Skills: Professor McCarthy will be working on several projects this spring—including a new book of his selected writings, speeches, and interviews; some grant writing for the Carr Center's Sexuality, Gender & Human Rights Program; and work related to his ongoing collaboration with the American Repertory Theater. Students must be hard working and fun loving; responsible and reliable; self-motivated and interested in being part of the larger Carr Center community. Specifically, students should have strong experience with library research, manuscript editing, proposal writing, and social media. Familiarity with or interest in politics, social movements, theater, and human rights is obviously a plus.