Michelle Craig McDonald is the Librarian/Director of the Library & Museum at the American Philosophical Society. She has worked for nearly three decades as an educator and administrator. Michelle earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan where she focused on business relationships and consumer behavior between North America and the Caribbean during the 18th and 19th centuries. She is the co-author of Public Drinking in the Early Modern World: Voices from the Tavern (Pickering & Chatto/Routledge Press, 2011), and has contributed to anthologies published by Oxford University Press, Cornell University Press, Roman & Littlefield, and Berg Publishers. Her work has also appeared in the William & Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, Common-Place, the Business History Review, and the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Her current monograph, Caffeine Dependence: Coffee and the Economy of Early America, is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press and uses the early coffee industry to demonstrate the United States’ dependency on the plantation economies of the Caribbean and Brazil long after political independence.
Michelle’s research has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Winterthur Library and Museum, and she has served on governing boards of the Association of Caribbean Historians, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Before joining the APS, Michelle was a professor of Atlantic History at Stockton University, where she also worked in the Provost Office for seven years. In addition to her doctorate, she holds an M.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College, Annapolis, and M.A. in Museum Studies from George Washington University, and a B.A. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was the Harvard-Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellow in Business History at the Harvard Business School.