His principal academic interests were related to medieval philosophy, particularly the work of John Scotus Eriugena and Robert Grosseteste.

McEvoy undertook undergraduate and postgraduate study in the Department of Scholastic Philosophy at Queen’s University of Belfast, where he wrote his MA thesis on Robert Grosseteste's commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite's Celestial Hierarchy.

[1] He studied for his Bachelor of Divinity at St Patrick's College, Maynooth, and was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1968 for the Diocese of Down and Connor.

In 1974, he was awarded his PhD by the Université catholique de Louvain for a dissertation on the philosophy of Grosseteste, which he wrote under the supervision of Fernand Van Steenberghen.

He was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1982 and conferred with an honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Leicester at Lincoln Cathedral in 2004, the same year that a volume on friendship, Amor amicitiae, was published in his honour.