Performing 1776: The Politics and Poetics of the Declaration of Independence

In the first lecture of the 1776 Salon series, Professors Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer draw from their very popular course “American Protest Literature from Tom Paine to Tupac,” which they have co-taught to thousands of students in Harvard College and Harvard Extension School since 2001.

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Timothy Patrick McCarthy

Timothy Patrick McCarthy is an award-winning scholar and educator, public servant, and social justice activist who has taught on the faculty at Harvard University since 2005. He currently holds a joint appointment in the undergraduate honors program in History and Literature, Graduate School of Education, and John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he is Core Faculty at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Twice named one of Harvard Crimson’s “Professors of the Year,” he received the 2019 Manuel C. Carballo Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Kennedy School’s highest teaching honor. The adopted only son and grandson of public school teachers and factory workers, McCarthy was educated at Harvard and Columbia, where he received his Ph.D. in History. A noted historian of politics and social movements, he is the author or editor of five books from the New Press, including the forthcoming Stonewall’s Children: Living Queer History in an Age of Liberation, Loss, and Love. A frequent media commentator, he served as guest editor for The Nation’s historic “Reclaiming Stonewall 50” forum in June 2019. McCarthy is also a board member for the Tony Award-winning American Repertory Theater, where he hosts and directs The A.R.T. of Human Rights and Resistance Mic!.

John Stauffer

John Stauffer is the Kates Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of 20 books and over 100 articles, including GIANTS: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, a national bestseller; The Black Hearts of Men, co-winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize; and Picturing Frederick Douglass, a Lincoln Prize finalist. His essays and reviews have appeared in Time, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and in journals and books. From 2015 to 2018 he edited 21st Editions, a limited edition photography press. He has presented on national radio and TV and served as a consultant or co-curator on films, exhibitions, and video games, including “God in America”, Django Unchained, WAR/​PHOTOGRAPHY, The Free State of Jones, The Abolitionists, Red Dead Redemption 2, and “Reconstruction: America After the Civil War”. He lives in Cambridge with his wife, Deborah Cunningham, and their two sons, Erik and Nicholas.