Patrick Spero

Patrick Spero is the Chief Executive Officer of the American Philosophical Society, the nation's oldest learned Society. Dr. Spero is an award-winning historian who has published widely on the era of the American Revolution. He is the author of four books. They are Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania (2016), which was named a staff pick by the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2017; Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776 (2018), winner of the Philadelphia Athenaeum’s Literary Award and a finalist for the Journal of the American Revolution’s best book of the year; The Scientist Turned Spy: André Michaux, Thomas Jefferson, and the Kentucky Conspiracy of 1793 (2024); and The Other Presidency: Thomas Jefferson and the American Philosophical Society (2024). He is also the co-editor of The American Revolution Reborn: New Perspectives for the 21st Century (2016), a book that one reviewer said “will surely secure a place in the historiographical pantheon.”

He previously served as Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon and the Librarian of the American Philosophical Society and was on the faculty at Williams College He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and B.A. from James Madison University.