Born on the banks of the Erie Canal, McCormick received his Ph.D. from the Université catholique de Louvain. He previously taught in the Department of History of the Johns Hopkins University and was a Research Associate at Dumbarton Oaks. He came to Harvard in 1991, where he is presently the Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History, He chairs the University-wide Initiative for the Science of the Human Past at Harvard (SoHP), an interdisciplinary research networks that brings together geneticists, archaeological scientists, climatologists, environmental, computer and information scientists, humanists and social scientists in order to explore great questions of human history from our origins in Africa to our migrations across the globe; since 2016, he has served as co-founder and Director in the U.S. of the Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for Archaeoscience, Ancient Mediterranean (MHAAM). MHAAM pairs the complementary strengths Harvard’s SoHP with those of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Dept. of Archaeogenetics, in Leipzig. He has written numerous monographs and articles, including Origins of the European Economy. Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300-900 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K.; 2001) which won the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America, was short-listed for the British Academy Book Award (best non-fiction book published in the UK, 2002) and won the Ranki Prize of the Economic History Association. His most recent book is Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land: Wealth, Personnel and Buildings of a Mediterranean Church between Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Dumbarton Oaks-Harvard University Press, 2011). McCormick has been awarded fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte, Frankfurt-am-Main, Commission internationale d'histoire médiévale, etc. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation honored him with its Distinguished Achievement Award in 2002. He is a Fellow/Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, the American Philosophical Society, the Society of Antiquaries, London, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, and of the Monumenta Germaniae historica. In 2025, he was elected an Associé of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres de l’Institut de France. He is general editor of Mapping Past Societies and its innovative free data distribution site. McCormick’s current research focuses on developing new archaeological, archaeogenetic, paleoclimate and textual approaches to the fall of the Roman Empire; since 2020, he has coauthored numerous articles in Nature, Antiquity, Cell, Science Advances, Science Bulletin, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, and Dendrochronologia, and single-authored studies in Speculum and Dumbarton Oaks Papers.