[5] McDonald then accepted a professorship at Harvard University as Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures in 1994,[6] where she subsequently served as Department Chair between 2000–2006.
[7] McDonald has been a visiting professor at the École Normale Supérieure (rue d’Ulm),[8] and the Institute of French Cultural Studies at Dartmouth College.
[12] McDonald's publications on eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, and in particular, Jean-Jacques Rousseau from the 1960s to 2010 (from The Extravagant Shepherd to her co-edited volume Rousseau and Freedom[13]), at the cross-roads of literature, philosophy, and anthropology, have focused on the critique of the past and of past assumptions that connects the discourse of the eighteenth century with that of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century: concepts of equality, freedom and The Social Contract.
She has also brought to light the work of two American women artists (from her family's archive) in the cross-cultural context of twentieth-century political and cultural life, in the edited volumes Images of Congo (2005),[17] Painting My World: The Art of Dorothy Eisner (2009),[18] and through her biography, The Life and Art of Anne Eisner: An American Artist between Cultures (2020).
Her book Dispositions (1986) includes four essays on music, sound, and text in the writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marcel Proust, and Jacques Derrida.