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Harry Mccarthy

Assistant Professor of English
Harry Mccarthy
Pronouns He / Him / His Email harrymcc@usc.edu Office THH 402k

Research & Practice Areas

Shakespeare, Early Modern Drama, Early Modern Performance Studies, Theater History, Childhood Studies, Premodern Critical Race Studies, Early Modern Trans Studies

Biography

Harry McCarthy grew up just outside Oxford, England, and was the first in his family to attend university. He holds a BA in English and French and PhD in English from the University of Exeter (UK) and a MSt in English (1550-1700) from the University of Oxford. His doctoral dissertation, “Boy Actors on the Early Modern English Stage: Performance, Physicality, and the Work of Play,” became the first by a British scholar to win the Shakespeare Association of America’s J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize in 2021. Between 2020 and 2023, he held a Research Fellowship at Jesus College, University of Cambridge, and worked as a Lecturer in Early Modern English at the University of Exeter before joining USC in 2025.

The thread that runs through Harry McCarthy’s work is an interest in the body and the various ways in which it is marked, categorised, and exhibited, particularly in performance. His latest monograph, Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre, examines what it meant, and took, to perform as a boy actor on early modern English stages. He is now at work on a new book project, Early Modern Childhood and the Engendering of Difference, which interrogates how early modern children were subject to structures of racialized and gendered formation and how this gendered racial thinking infiltrates representations of children in the literature, drama, and culture of the period. In addition to these projects, he has published articles on early modern childhood, theatrical culture, and contemporary race studies in journals including Early Theatre, English Literary History, Shakespeare, and Shakespeare Survey, and has more  recently completed a new critical introduction to Shakespeare and Peele’s Titus Andronicus for the Oxford World’s Classics series as well as a multimedia introduction to the spaces in which Shakespeare made his name as a playwright for the Cambridge Shakespeare.

Education

  • Ph.D. English, University of Exeter, 2019
  • Other Degree MSt English (1550-1700), University of Oxford, 2016
  • B.A. English and French, University of Exeter, 2015

  • Tenure Track Appointments

    • Assistant Professor of English, USC, 08/2025 –

    Research, Teaching, Practice, and Clinical Appointments

    • Lecturer in Early Modern English, University of Exeter, 2023-09-2025-08

    PostDoctoral Appointments

    • Research Fellow in English, Jesus College, University of Cambridge, 01/2020 – 08/2023

  • Research Specialties

    Shakespeare, Early Modern Drama, Early Modern Performance Studies, Theater History, Childhood Studies, Premodern Critical Race Studies, Early Modern Trans Studies

  • Book

    • McCarthy, H. R. (2025). Titus Andronicus. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.

    Book Chapters

    • McCarthy, H. R. (2025). ‘Not He; the Queen’: Boyed Blackness and Queer Race in Antony and Cleopatra. Race/Queer/Queens Tempe, Arizona: ACMRS Press.
    • McCarthy, H. R. (2022). Performing Shakespeare’s Contemporaries. The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama pp. 293-309. London: Bloomsbury.

    Journal Article

    • McCarthy, H. R. (2021). ‘M[aster] Monkesters schollars’: Richard Mulcaster, Physical Education, and the Early Modern Boy Companies. Early Theatre. Vol. 24 (2), pp. 31-54.
    • McCarthy, H. R., Mills, P. (2021). Going to School with(out) Shakespeare: Conversations with Edward’s Boys. Shakespeare Survey. Vol. 74, pp. 238-52.
    • McCarthy, H. R. (2021). Leave to Speak: White Scholars, ‘Allyship,’ and Shakespeare Studies. Shakespeare. Vol. 17 (1), pp. 134-42.
    • McCarthy, H. R. (2020). The Circulation of Youthful Energy on the Early Modern London Stage: Migration, Intertheatricality, and ‘Growing to Common Players’. Shakespeare Survey. Vol. 73, pp. 43-62.
    • McCarthy, H. R. (2018). Men in the Making: Youth, the Repertory, and the ‘Children’ of the Queen’s Revels, 1609-13. English Literary History. Vol. 85 (3), pp. 599-629.

    Monograph

    • McCarthy, H. R. (2022). Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre. Cambridge University Press.
    • McCarthy, H. R. (2020). Performing Early Modern Drama Beyond Shakespeare: Edward’s Boys. Cambridge University Press.
    • Boys will be Boys? Youthful Masculinities and Sexual Identities on Page, Stage, and Screen, General Education Seminar, Fall 2025
    • Digital Resource, Shakespeare’s Stages: a multimedia guide to the theatrical spaces that made Shakespeare’s name as a playwright. Part of the Cambridge Shakespeare. , 2025 –
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