Jesse McCarthy, Ph.D.
Assistant professor jointly appointed in the Department of English and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University
Jesse McCarthy, Ph.D. is an assistant professor jointly appointed in the Department of English and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His research is concerned with the intersection between politics and aesthetics in African American literature, postwar or post-45 literary history, and Black Studies. His dissertation The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War, 1945 – 1965 argues for a reinterpretation of black literary aesthetics in the early Cold War and for the value of a discrete periodization of that era. He is also interested in modernism, film, poetics, and translation.
While a graduate student at Princeton University Dr. McCarthy founded a Digital Humanities project based on the Sylvia Beach archives held at Princeton’s Firestone Library called “Mapping Expatriate Paris.” His writing on culture, politics, and literature has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic and n+1. He also serves as an editor at The Point.
Dr. McCarthy was recipient of a literary Whiting Award 2022 in the category non-fiction for his essay collection Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? He is also the author of The Fugitivities.
