Jesse McCarthy

John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and of the Social Sciences

*Currently accepting graduate student advisees

Office: Barker 234

617-495-3052

jessemccarthy@fas.harvard.edu

Office hours: Tuesdays 1-3pm

Education:

Ph.D. in English, Princeton University 2018
M.A. in English, Princeton University 2013
B.A. English, Amherst College 2006

Interests: the novel, African American literature, African diaspora literatures, postwar or post-45 literary history, American literature, Black studies, modernism, aesthetics, film, intellectual history and the history of criticism, French literature, poetics and translation.

Selected Works:

Books

The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War (University of Chicago Press, 2024) Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism (read a review in Critical Inquiry)
Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? Essays (Liveright, 2021) 2022 Whiting Award Winner for Nonfiction
The Fugitivities: A Novel (Melville House, 2021)

Edited Books

Co-Editor with Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Norton Critical Edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane (W.W. Norton, forthcoming 2025)
Section Editor, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 4^th Ed. (W.W. Norton, 2025)
Co-Editor with Joshua Bennett, Minor Notes Vol. 1 (Penguin, 2023)
Editor, W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (W.W. Norton, 2022)

Peer-Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters

“What Difference Does Paris Make in The Ambassadors?” Modern Philology, Volume 122, Number 4 (May 2025): 504-526.
“On Being Beside Oneself: Identity as a Limit to Aesthetic Judgment.” New Literary History, Volume 55, Numbers 3-4 (Summer/Autumn 2024): 369-387.
“Form and the Anticolonial Novel: William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face.” Novel Volume 55, Number 1 (May 1, 2022): 61–94.
“The Essay, Abolition, and Racial Blackness.” The Cambridge Companion to The Essay, edited by Kara Wittman and Evan Kindley, 126–40. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
“Postwar Literary Aesthetics.” Ralph Ellison in Context, edited by Paul Devlin, 290–99; Cambridge University Press, 2022.
“The Blues in Print: Wright’s ‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’ Reconsidered.” Richard Wright in Context, edited by Michael Nowlin, 205–14. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
“Proust au téléphone: placer la Recherche sur écoute.” Transposition 6 (2016).

Media

You can listen to a conversation about my monograph The Blue Period on the New Book Network podcast here. The London Review of Books hosted a conversation about my essay collection Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? and I talked with NPR’s Scott Simon about my novel The Fugitivities. I also serve as an editor-at-large for the magazine The Point, and as a literary fiction editor for Public Books.

Digital Humanities

While a graduate student at Princeton I co-founded a Digital Humanities project with Professor Joshua Kotin based on the Sylvia Beach archives held at Princeton's Firestone Library called The Shakespeare and Company Project.

Selected Literary and Cultural Essays

“Return to my Native Land” The New York Review of Books, April 24, 2025.

“L’artiste et les marées de l’histoire.” Afrotropes: des imaginaires en movement, January 2024.

“The Emancipation of Sensibility.” The Point, July 19, 2023.

“A New Biography of Tupac Shakur.” The Washington Post, December 1, 2023.

“B-Sides: John Keene’s Annotations,” Public Books, October 14, 2021.

“This was our music, and our conscience,” The Guardian, April 22, 2021.

“On Integration,” co-authored with Jon Baskin. The Point, October 19, 2020.

“On Afropessimism.” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 20, 2020.

“Finding the Other: Toni Morrison’s Revolution.” The Nation, December 16, 2019.

“Toni Morrison’s Cosmos.” The Nation, August 8, 2019.

“Notes on Trap.” n+1, October 2018.