Program Staff
Roderick A. McDonald, 
Project Director, is Professor of History at Rider University and Editor of the Journal of the Early Republic. He is the author of several books on African American and Afro-Caribbean history.
Roderick A. McDonald earned his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and teaches courses in American history, African American history, and Caribbean history. He is the author of Between Slavery and Freedom: Special Magistrate John Anderson’s Journal of St. Vincent during the Apprenticeship (University of Pennsylvania, 2001) and The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (LSU, 1993), and editor of West Indies Accounts: Essays on the History of the British Caribbean and the Atlantic Economy in Honour of Richard Sheridan (University of West Indies, 1996). He has also published numerous articles and is at present completing a book entitled, The Ethnography and Pornography of Slavery: Dr. Jonathan Troup’s Journal of Dominica, 1789-1791.
Michelle Craig McDonald, Project Co-Director, is Assistant Professor of History at Richard Stockton College and studies early American trade and consumer behavior. She is also Pedagogical Coordinator for the “One Nation, Many Americans” Project, a U.S. Department of Education Teaching American History Program.
Michelle Craig McDonald holds an M.A. in Museum Studies and worked in museum education and school programming for eight years before receiving her Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan. Her work appears in Food and Globalization: Consumption, Markets, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), and the Harvard Business School Case Studies series, the William and Mary Quarterly, the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, and Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life.
Patrick K. Spero, Assistant Project Director, is a Ph.D. candidate in American History at the University of Pennsylvania and is completing a dissertation on the unfolding of the American Revolution on the Pennsylvania frontier. He is also a research associate and fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Patrick K. Spero has worked as NEH Program Administrator for the National Constitution Center where he helped implement NEH Summer Landmarks Workshops in 2006 and 2007. He has also served as the Journal of the Early Republic editorial assistant (2004-present) and is the research historian for a docudrama in development, “Conversations with Greatness: Washington and Lincoln."
