Frederick Douglass Lecture 2023

Dr. 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, and African American intellectual history. This year he is serving as a Just Transformations Mellon Colored Conventions Project Senior Research Fellow at Penn State’s Center for Black Digital Research. His first book, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 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.