[1][3] During his time in the United States, he wrote introductions for the dramatisations of novels on behalf of the Boston public radio station WGBH.

He was made a Visiting Lecturer at the Istituto Universitario di Lingue Moderne in Milan (now known as IULM University) in 1992, and from 2005 to 2019 was an Associate Professor there.

Parks has translated works by Alberto Moravia, Antonio Tabucchi, Italo Calvino, Roberto Calasso, Niccolò Machiavelli, Giacomo Leopardi, Cesare Pavese, and Fleur Jaeggy.

In 2011 he co-curated the exhibition Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, and a book of the same title, edited by Ludovica Sebregondi and Tim Parks, was published in 2012 by Giunti.

The exhibition was loosely based on Parks' book Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence.