Derrick R. Spires
Derrick R. Spires, associate professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, has won the Modern Language Association (MLA) Prize for a First Book for “The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States.”
In the book, Spires examines the parallel development of early Black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship between 1787 and 1861.
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.
“Going far beyond the traditional corpus of acknowledged Black American writers and thinkers,” the committee wrote, “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 de