Michelle Craig McDonald is Associate Professor of Atlantic history and Program Coordinator of History at Stockton College, where she has taught since 2006. She offers courses in early American history, Atlantic history, and public history. She is the co-editor of Voices from the Tavern: Public Drinking in the Early Modern World with David J. Hancock, part of a multi-volume primary document series on tavern culture around the world published by Pickering and Chatto, and is currently completing Caffeine Dependence: Coffee and Commerce in Early America, which uses the history of coffee to argue for the importance of the Caribbean in early American economic development, to be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Additional work has appeared in the Oxford Handbook Series (History of Consumption), Oxford Online Bibliography Project, William and Mary Quarterly, Harvard Business School Case Studies Series, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, and Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life.
She is the Secretary-Treasurer (2010-2013) for the Association of Caribbean Historians, an independent, non-profit, professional organization devoted to the promotion of Caribbean history (http://www.associationofcaribbeanhistorians.org), and on the Advisory Board (2011-2013) for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (http://www.shear.org) and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (2011-present, http://www.mceas.org).
Professor McDonald was born in southern California. She received her B.A. in history from UCLA (1990) and M.A. in Museum Studies and American Studies from the George Washington University (1993). For the next five years, she worked in museum education and outreach, and completed an M.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College, Annapolis (1995), before enrolling in the Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan in 1998 (completed 2005). She lives with her husband Roderick A. McDonald in Philadelphia.