MCCARTHY

I am a writer and an assistant professor jointly appointed in the Department of English and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. My academic research is concerned with the intersection between politics and aesthetics in African American literature, postwar or post-45 literary history, and Black Studies. My first monograph The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War (University of Chicago Press, 2024) argues for a reinterpretation of black literary aesthetics in the early Cold War and for the value of a discrete periodization of that era. I am also interested in modernism, film, poetics and translation. While a graduate student at Princeton I founded a Digital Humanities project based on the Sylvia Beach archives held at Princeton's Firestone Library called Mapping Expatriate Paris. My writing on culture, politics, and literature has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic and n+1. I also serve..