Professor James McCarthy earned a B.A. in English and Environmental Studies from Dartmouth College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining the Graduate School of Geography in 2011, he was an Assistant and Associate Professor of Geography at Penn State University (2000-2011).

Professor McCarthy’s areas of interest include: political ecology; political economy; environmental politics, policy, and governance; property; rural areas and extractive industries; social movements; and social theory.

His research and teaching center on questions of environmental governance: how people lay claim to and struggle over their environments; how human societies regulate their relationships with their environments and with what consequences; and, especially, how the political-economic structures and dynamics of capitalist societies produce particular sorts of environmental transformations, dynamics, and outcomes. In each case, he is interested in whether the relationships in question are just and sustainable, and in how they transform individuals, societies, and environments over time. Professor McCarthy has investigated these questions with respect to a variety of environments and dynamics in the United States and Canada, and globally, including comparative analyses of public lands politics and community forestry programs, the scalar strategies of environmental NGOs and social movements, the effects of neoliberal ideas in environmental governance, and the relationships between trade policy and environmental regulation. He believes strongly in the practical application of ideas, and has done work for the Ford Foundation, Oxfam, and other organizations involved in shaping policy and programs in these areas.