Derrick R. Spires

Derrick R. Spires is the John and Patricia Cochran Scholar of Inclusive Excellence and Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware. He specializes in early African American and American print culture, citizenship studies, and African American intellectual history. His first book, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), won the Modern Language Association Prize for First Book and the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize. Spires is part of the editorial team for the Broadview Anthology of American Literature, and he edits the book series, “Black Print and Organizing in the Long Nineteenth Century,” with P. Gabrielle Foreman and Shirley Moody-Turner at the University of Pennsylvania Press. Spires’s work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon/Mays Initiatives, the American Antiquarian Society and other learned societies.