History professor John McCarthy has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to teach and lecture next spring in Bratislava, Slovakia.

McCarthy will teach graduate-level courses in immigration history, comparative urban history, and modern American history next spring at Comenius University, Slovakia’s largest institution of higher learning. He will be RMU’s fifth Fulbright Scholar since 2008. 

A member of RMU faculty for 13 years, McCarthy helped to found the university’s undergraduate degree program in history. He has a longtime interest in Central Europe, and taught English for a high school program in Poland in 2001. 

The immigration class McCarthy plans to teach next year will focus on the experience of Slovaks who came to America, especially the Pittsburgh region. “Western Pennsylvania is home to America’s largest number of citizens with Slovak ancestry,” he said.

McCarthy has received RMU’s Distinguished Research Award for “Making Milwaukee Mightier,” his 2009 book on politics and city planning in Milwaukee in the first half of the 20th century. He says his comparative urban history class in Slovakia will look for parallels between Bratislava, a city under the Soviet sphere of influence for many decades, and Milwaukee, which was governed by socialist mayors for many of the years he researched.

McCarthy is the executive secretary of the Society of American City and Regional Planning Historians. He is married with three children.

“I want my family to experience life in another country, so we can teach our children that the world is a much bigger place than western Pennsylvania,” he said.

The Fulbright Scholars program is sponsored by the U.S. State Department and offers awards to experienced American faculty to support teaching and research abroad.