Program Staff
Roderick A. McDonald, 
Project Director, is Professor of History at Rider University and Editor Emeritus of the Journal of the Early Republic. He is the author of several books on African American and Afro-Caribbean history, and is a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. For more information visit: http://www.rider.edu/172_3844.htm
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. For more information visit: http://titania.stockton.edu/mcdonald
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), the Harvard Business School Case Studies series, the William and Mary Quarterly, the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life, and the Oxford Handbook Series.
Laura Keenan Spero, Assistant Project Director, is a Ph.D. candidate in American History at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies the history of early America, Native America, and women and gender. She is currently completing a dissertation on the history of the Shawnees.
Laura Keenan Spero published “Reconstructing Rachel” in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography based on her archival research on Rachel Francisco, a free black woman accused of infanticide in Delaware. She has also worked as Program Administrator for NEH Landmarks Workshops at the National Constitution Center in 2006 and is a McNeil Center for Early American Studies research fellow.
