Spires, a specialist in early Black print culture, citizenship studies, and African American intellectual history, is an associate professor of English at the University of Delaware.
Occidental College is pleased to welcome Derrick R. Spires for a campus lecture on Feb. 18 at 7 p.m. in Choi Auditorium. He will present a free public lecture titled “Simple Justice: Frances E.W. Harper's Reconstruction.”
His scholarship and teaching are invested in fleshing out a rich and full account of earlier African American literature and Black aesthetic sensibilities, from the tragicomic to the mundane. He is committed to recovering the rich imaginative worlds African-descended people generated through print and exploring how imagining enabled Black folk to make material change.
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. The book traces how Black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship through a robust print culture, including Black newspapers, the Colored Conventions movement, and other ephemera. 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 on Black print culture, seriality, and Black bibliography appears or is forthcoming in African American Review, American Literary History, PBSA, and American Literature and 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.
Created by Occidental’s Black Alumni Organization (BAO), the Stafford Ellison Wright Endowment enables distinguished Black scholars, artists, elected officials, and others to spend time in residence at Occidental each year. BAO members believe that a student’s educational experience will be enriched by in-depth contact with individuals who serve as symbols of excellence.
The Endowment honors Occidental’s first Black graduates, all members of the Class of 1952: Dr. Janet Stafford, George F. Ellison, and Barbara Bowman Wright.
