Karen Frances McCarthy, PhD, is an Irish Spiritualist medium, author, and scholar who has spent more than fifteen years working at the threshold between this world and the next. She holds a doctorate in contemporary ghost literature from the University of Birmingham, a member of the UK’s prestigious Russell Group of research universities. She is an adjunct faculty member at New York University School of Professional Studies, specializing in spectral and speculative fiction. Trained at the Arthur Findlay College, she holds three Certificates of Recognition from the Spiritualist National Union in mediumship, spiritual healing, and public speaking.
Before turning to this work, she was a political journalist and war correspondent. She is the author of The Other Irish (Sterling, 2011), supported by Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs as part of the Northern Ireland peace process. The sudden death of her fiancé turned her toward the questions of consciousness and continued connection that now shape both her writing and her mediumship, leading to Till Death Don’t Us Part (White Crow Books, 2020), The Re-enchanted Ghost in Contemporary American Fiction (Routledge, 2026), and Still Here: Continuing Relationships with Loved Ones in Spirit (White Crow Books, 2027). She speaks at conferences and publishes widely on spirituality, metaphysics, and bereavement.
Her mediumship draws on the same instincts as her writing: attention to character, story, and the texture of a life that continues across worlds, seen and unseen, more vast and varied than we imagine. She lives between New York and Dublin with her two cats, Tara and Tuatha, whose names come from Irish mythology.
