Dr Harry McCarthy (he/him)

I grew up in Abingdon, just outside Oxford, where I attended local comprehensive schools before starting a BA in English and French at Exeter in 2011. I left Exeter in 2015 to pursue an M.St. in English (1550-1700) at the University of Oxford, and returned in 2016 after being awarded a South, West, and Wales DTP PhD scholarship which allowed me to continue to pursue my interests in the training, rehearsal, performance, and afterlives of early modern boy actors. My thesis, "Boy Actors on the Early Modern English Stage: Performance, Physicality, and the Work of Play," became the first by a UK scholar to win the Shakespeare Association of America's J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize in 2021. Between 2020 and 2023, I held a Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge, and returned to Exeter as Lecturer in Early Modern Literature in September 2023.

I was the Performance Reviews Editor for Shakespeare Bulletin until 2017, and also worked as Editorial Assistant for the journal. In 2021, I was appointed to the Advisory Board of Shakespeare Survey. I also serve as the Membership Secretary for the Malone Society.

The thread that runs through my work is an interest in the body and the various ways in which it is marked, categorised, and exhibited, particularly in performance. My 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. This work speaks readily to the teaching I contribute to undergraduate and postgraduate modules at Exeter. My new research project interrogates how early modern children were subject to structures of racial formation and how depictions of childhood in the literature and drama of the period were informed by notions of whiteness. I have also recently completed a new critical introduction to Shakespeare and Peele's Titus Andronicus for the Oxford World's Classics series.

I am committed to anti-racist pedagogy and advancing racial justice in the field of early modern studies and beyond. You can read my thoughts on the issue here.

My pronouns are he/him/his. I tweet - or do whatever people do on 'X' - at @HarryMcCarthy.