Professor Spellmeyer is the author of Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century (2003), The New Humanities Reader (with Richard E. Miller, 2002), and Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition (1992), as well as articles on the theory of composition, critical theory of composition, critical theory, and academic institutions. He is currently at work on a book, World without End: Saving the Humanities in an Age of Specialization, which examines the ways in which the modern system of professors has helped to reconstitute older—and undemocratic—forms of social privilege.