Derrick R. Spires

Derrick R. Spires is Associate Professor of Literatures in English and affiliate faculty in American Studies, Visual Studies, and Media Studies at Cornell University. 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 Bibliographical Society/St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize and was a finalist for the Library Company of Philadelphia’s first book award. He is editor of “Genealogies of Black Modernities,” a special issue of American Literary History published in 2020, and his work on nineteenth-century Black politics appears in edited volumes, included The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2021). Spires’s work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Mellon/Mays Initiatives.