Dr. McDonald received his Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz (2008) and the M.A. in History from Rutgers University/NJIT. He was an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Carnegie Mellon University (2011-12). His book, Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World, (University of California Press, 2015), explores a global trade network located on the peripheries of world empires and shows the illicit ways American colonists met the consumer demand for slaves and East India goods.