History

Education

• PhD, Washington University
• MA, Washington University
• MA, University of Chicago
• BA, Knox College

Interests and Expertise

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.

Courses

• HIST 115: What is an American?
• HIST 123: The United States to 1877
• HIST 380: American Colonies
• HIST 415/519: Sexual Communities in American History
• HIST 432/532: Native American History
• HIST 462/562: The Atlantic World
• HIST 480/580: The American Revolution
• HIST 501: Reading US History
• HIST 505: Historical Methods
• HIST 601: Researching US History

Publications and Presentations

Books

• Vicious and Immoral: Homosexuality, the American Revolution, and the Trials of Robert Newburgh (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024).
• Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2019).
• Citizen Bachelors: Manhood and the Creation of the United States (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009).

Articles and Chapters

• “Causes of the American Revolution in Virginia,” Virginia Encyclopedia, ed. Woody Holton and Christa Dierkeshiede (2024).
• “The British Army in Colonial America,” in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, ed. Jon Butler (2022).
• “Gender and Violence in Colonial America,” in Cambridge World History of Violence, Volume III: The Early Modern World, ed. Robert Antony, Stuart Carroll, and Caroline Dodds Pennock, 255-273 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
• "From Fort George to the Fields: The Public Space and Military Geography of Revolutionary New York City," Journal of Urban History 44 (2018): 625-42.
• "Citizen-Soldiers in the Revolutionary Era and New Republic," in The Routledge Handbook of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military, ed. Kara Dixon Vuic, 24-40 (New York: Routledge, 2018).
• “Gentlemen and Soldiers: Competing Visions of Manhood in Early Jamestown,” in New Men: Manliness in Early America, ed. Thomas A. Foster, 9-30 (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
• “‘Your Affectionate Brother’: Complementary Manhoods in the Letters of John and Timothy Pickering,” Early American Studies 4 (2006): 512-45.
• “Marbury v. Madison (1803),” The Lynn Rivers Show, WEMU 89.1 (6 February 2012).
• "We the Bachelors," The New York Times (4 July 2009).

Public History Talks

• “Vicious and Immoral,” American History TV, C-SPAN 2 (September 14, 2024).
• Worlds Turned Upside Down, R2 Studios, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University (2023-24).
• “Episode 46: The Bill of Rights & YOU! Third Amendment,” Constituting America Constitutional Chat (November 10, 2020).
• “Quartering Troops in Early America with John McCurdy,” podcast, Conversations at the Washington Library with Jim Ambuske (November 12, 2019).
• “Marbury v. Madison (1803),” The Lynn Rivers Show, WEMU 89.1 (February 6, 2012).

Grants, Honors and Awards

Distinguished Faculty Research II Award 2025

Professional

Associations/Memberships

• Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
• McNeil Center for Early American Studies
• Organization of American Historians