// Workers AI · dad joke modeIs Jesse McCarthy a good carpenter? He's got a lot of hammer time.
Jesse McCarthy | |
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| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Amherst College (BA) Princeton University (Ph.D.) |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | English, African and African American Studies |
| Institutions | Harvard University |
Jesse McCarthy is an American essayist and cultural critic who is the John J. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.[1][2]
Publications
[edit]Cultural criticism
[edit]McCarthy has published on topics including Marcel Proust, Tupac Shakur, and the representation of women in the civil rights movement in film.[3][2]
Non-fiction
[edit]In 2021, Norton’s Liveright imprint published Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?, an essay collection addressing questions such as: “What do people owe each other when debts accrued can never be repaid?”[4] In 2024, the University of Chicago Press brought out the monograph The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War, which argues that black authors working between World War II and the rise of the Black power movement “forged an aesthetic resistance premised on fierce dissent from both US racial liberalism and Soviet communism.”[5]
Fiction
[edit]His debut novel, The Fugitivities, was released June 2021.[6][7] It is the story of Jonah Winters, a young black man forming his identity, with parts of the story set in Brooklyn, Brazil, Montevideo and Paris.[7] He cites Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education as an important source of inspiration.[7]
Editor
[edit]- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Norton Library, 2022)[8]
- Minor Notes, Volume 1 (Penguin, 2023), with Joshua Bennett, with an introduction by Tracy K. Smith.[9]
- Jean Toomer, Cane (3rd Norton Critical Edition, 2025), with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.[10]
- The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (4th ed., 2025), section editor with Farah Jasmine Griffin.[11]
Awards
[edit]McCarthy was recipient of a 2022 Whiting Award ($50,000) in the non-fiction category, granted by the Whiting Foundation in Brooklyn, for Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?[12]
The Blue Period was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.[13]
References
[edit]- ↑ Walker, Jerald (March 26, 2021). "To This Essayist and Cultural Critic, the Black Tradition Is Resistance". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on October 25, 2021. Retrieved October 25, 2021.
- 1 2 "Jesse McCarthy". Harvard University Department of African and African American Studies. Archived from the original on February 11, 2026. Retrieved May 6, 2026.
- ↑ Lott, Martha (2017). "The Relationship Between the 'Invisibility' of African American Women in the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s and Their Portrayal in Modern Film". Journal of Black Studies. 48 (4): 331–54.
- ↑ "Book review of Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?: Essays by Jesse McCarthy". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on December 25, 2022. Retrieved October 25, 2021.
- ↑ McCarthy, Jesse. The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War. Thinking Literature. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
- ↑ "Briefly Noted". The New Yorker. June 16, 2021. Archived from the original on October 25, 2021. Retrieved October 25, 2021.
- 1 2 3 "In Jesse McCarthy's Debut Novel, A Young Black Man Goes In Search Of Himself". NPR.org. Archived from the original on October 29, 2021. Retrieved October 29, 2021.
- ↑ "The Souls of Black Folk". wwnorton.com. Retrieved May 6, 2026.
- ↑ Johnson, George Moses Horton,Fenton Johnson,Georgia Douglas (August 3, 2023). Minor Notes, Volume 1.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ↑ "Cane". wwnorton.com. Retrieved May 6, 2026.
- ↑ "Welcome to The Norton Anthology of African American Literature". seagull.wwnorton.com. Retrieved May 6, 2026.
- ↑ "Jesse McCarthy 2022 Winner in Nonfiction". whiting.org. Archived from the original on April 10, 2022. Retrieved April 10, 2022.
- ↑ "2024". National Book Critics Circle. Retrieved May 6, 2026.
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