Spellmeyer is the author of
Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction (
Wisdom Publications, 2010)
, Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century (
SUNY Press, 2003),
The New Humanities Reader (
Houghton-Mifflin, 2002),
Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition (
Prentice Hall, 1992). In
Arts of Living, Spellmeyer asks readers to separate the explicit content of academic knowledge from the way that this knowledge helps perpetuate enduring forms of
structural inequality. He is critical of both conservative elitists like
Allan Bloom and self-professed "
leftists" who claim an
oppositional status while reinforcing
class distinctions of the kind described by
Pierre Bourdieu. Although Spellmeyer's research has been influenced by
sociologists like Bourdieu,
Charles Derber, and others, he is particularly indebted to
Barbara and
John Ehrenreich's work on the rise of "new class"—the professional-managerial elite, including academics, who have become the core of the
Democratic Party in the U.S., displacing a working-class constituency. In a review of
Arts of Living, one critic said: Spellmeyer has also published articles on theories of
composition/rhetoric,
critical theory, and the
sociology of knowledge and of academic institutions, in journals that include
College English,
College Composition and Communication,
The Journal of Advanced Composition,
Pedagogy,
Transformations, and
Religion and the Arts. Spellmeyer is a contributing editor at
Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. == Awards ==