Arthur K. Spears

Linguist and anthropologist Arthur K. Spears was born on November 16, 1943 in Kansas City, Kansas to Charleszine and Mack Spears. He earned his B.A. degrees in French (Honors), Spanish, and political science from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas in 1965. As a Fulbright scholar from 1965 to 1966, he studied at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay and the University of Chile in Santiago, Chile. In 1969, he earned his M.A. degree with distinction in international relations from John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington D.C. and an M.A. in linguistics from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Spears earned his Ph.D. degree in linguistics from the University of California, San Diego in 1977.

Spears has worked as a contract interpreter in four languages: English (his native language), French (his second language, learned in early childhood), Spanish, and Portuguese. Certified as one of the few four-language interpreters by the United States Department of State, he has interpreted for the Department of State, the United States Agency for International Development, the African American Institute, Crossroads Africa, and other entities since 1967. He was hired as an adjunct professor of anthropology at San Diego State University in 1972 and went on to become a faculty member at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1974. In 1983, he was hired by The City College of The City University of New York (CUNY).

In 1984 and 1985 respectively, he was appointed at the CUNY Graduate Center as a doctoral faculty member in the Anthropology and Linguistics Programs. During his thirty-three-year career with CUNY, Spears served as the acting director of the M.A. Program in Applied Urban Anthropology, exchange professor and resident director of the CUNY-University of Paris Exchange Program (1992-1993), director of the Black Studies Program at The City College (2007-2010), and acting chair and chair of the Council of Black Faculty and Staff. At the college, he was also acting chair of the Anthropology Department (2013-2014) and chair between 2002 and 2015. Spears was appointed presidential professor in 2013, becoming presidential professor emeritus after his retirement in 2016.

Spears was the president of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics from 2007 to 2009. In 1990, he was the founder and first editor, from 1990 to 1993, of Transforming Anthropology, the journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists, a section of the American Anthropological Association. He was on the editorial boards of the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages from 2007 to 2020, American Speech from 2005 to 2007, and CUNYForum beginning in 1991. Spears was an associate editor of Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America, from 2020 to 2022 and has served on the editorial board of the book series Oxford Studies in Language and Race since 2022.

Throughout his career, Spears has received numerous awards and honors, including a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies in 1982, a Scholars-in-Residence Fellowship from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in 1989, the Distinguished Service Award from the Association of Black Anthropologists in 1994, the Eisner Award from the Simon H. Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts at The City College in 2000, a Rockefeller Fellowship from the CUNY Institute for Research on the African Diaspora and the Caribbean in 2000, the Legacy Scholar Award from the Association of Black Anthropologists in 2013, and the Interdisciplinary Public Engagement Award from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology in 2018. In 2023, Spears was named as a fellow of the Linguistics Society of America.

Spears resides in New York, New York.

Arthur K. Spears was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on January 31, 2025 and May 13, 2025.