Michelle Craig McDonald

Michelle Craig McDonald is the Director of the Library & Museum for the American Philosophical Society. She has worked for nearly three decades as an educator and administrator in academic settings as well as museums and historic sites. She is currently the Director of the Library & Museum for the American Philosophical Society, and her research focuses on trade and consumer behavior in North America and the Caribbean during the 18th and 19th centuries. Her most recent book, Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in May 2025. 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.