EASTON — Due to a rainy weather forecast for Saturday, organizers for Frederick Douglass Day are modifying some parts of the event and relocating others.
Derrick Spires will talk about “Defining Democracy: How Black Print Culture Shaped America, Then and Now” Dec. 1 in a Society for the Humanities webcast hosted by eCornell.
Filed in Books, Honors & Awards on January 1, 2021
Derrick R. Spires, an associate professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has won the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book. He was honored for the book
In the book, Dr. Spires examines the parallel development of early Black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship between 1787 and 1861. Dr. Spires will be presented with the award during the MLA’s annual convention, to be held online in January.
The award committee calls
The Practice of Citizenship a “gorgeously written, powerfully argued and extensively researched book that casts vivid new light on a timely and important topic. Spires pursues an impressively broad exploration of Black print culture of all kinds, including the surviving minutes of political meetings in which Black Americans sought not only to secure their full rights of citizenship but also to define citi