Professor and Graduate Coordinator
History and Philosophy
701H Pray Harrold
Professor McCurdy specializes in colonial and Revolutionary America, gender, and LGBTQ+ history.
His research explores the cultural history of the eighteenth-century Anglo Atlantic. He seeks to understand how personal identity and citizenship were shaped by the Enlightenment and global struggles for independence in North America and around the world.
In Citizen Bachelors, Professor McCurdy considers the laws, lives, and literature of unmarried men in colonial America, and how this informed a more inclusive notion of American citizenship. In Quarters, he focuses on housing British soldiers on the eve of the Revolution, and how debates over military power shaped notions of place in the nation that followed. In his most recent book, Vicious and Immoral, he examines the case of a man tried for same-sex intimacy to understand how people in Revolutionary America understood LGBTQ+ people.
Distinguished Faculty Research II Award 2025