• Discipline: History
• Organization: U.S. Military Academy, West Point

Robert M. S. McDonald is associate professor of history at the United States Military Academy.  He is a graduate of the University of Virginia, Oxford University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned his Ph.D.  A specialist on Thomas Jefferson and the early American republic, he has published several journal articles and other essays.  He is editor of Thomas Jefferson's Military Academy:  Founding West Point (2004) and Light & Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the Power of Knowledge (2012).  He is completing another edited volume, Sons of the Father: George Washington and His Protégés, as well as a book to be titled Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson and the Politics of Personality. He lives in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York with his wife, Christine, and their children Jeff and Grace.