Derrick R. Spires

Derrick R. Spires is a John and Patricia Cochran Scholar of Inclusive Excellence and associate professor of English at the University of Delaware, where he specializes in early Black print culture, citizenship studies, and African American intellectual history. His scholarship and teaching take on topics ranging from nineteenth-century Black print and intellectual histories and Black speculative fiction to the Colored Conventions Movement and Black aesthetics to Black bibliography. His first book, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (Pennsylvania Press, 2019), won the Modern Language Association Prize for First Book and the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize. “Genealogies of Black Modernity” (2020), the special issue of American Literary History coedited with Gordon Hutner, won the MLA Council of Learned Journal’s award for Best Special Issue. Most recently Spires curated the “Black Print: African American Writing, 1773-1910” exhibition at Cornell University (2024-2025), which features nearly 150 items from Cornell’s Africana Rare Book and Manuscript Collections. Spires is part of the editorial team for the Broadview Anthology of American Literature, and he co-edits the book series, “Black Print and Organizing in the Long Nineteenth Century,” with P. Gabrielle Foreman at the University of Pennsylvania Press.