Peter J. Dougherty is Director of The American Philosophical Society Press, and Fox Family Pavilion Scholar and Distinguished Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the board of trustees of Ithaka. Following his years in commercial book publishing in New York, he worked as an editor at Princeton University Press, which he directed from 2005 through 2017.

He has served as president of the Association of American University Presses, on the board of the American Association of Publishers, and on the faculty of the University of Denver Publishing Institute. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2023.