About
Costas Spirou currently serves as a professor in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology and Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurial Strategies Officer for the University System of Georgia (USG). Most recently, he served as Interim Chief Academic Officer for the USG, where he led the system's academic enterprise serving approximately 365,000 students. In this role, he worked closely with USG's 25 public colleges and universities, overseeing numerous initiatives and units, including academic innovation, student success, faculty development, academic collaborative programs, academic libraries, the Georgia Public Library Service, and the Georgia Archives.
Previously, Spirou served as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Georgia College & State University, the state's designated public liberal arts institution. In 2017, he was named a Fellow by the American Council on Education (ACE) and spent the 2017–2018 academic year at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the Office of the Provost. He has held academic appointments at numerous institutions, including as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame (2009–2011) and as a Research Fellow at the Center for Cultural Understanding and Change at the Field Museum in Chicago (2005–2010). His previous faculty positions include appointments at DePaul University, National Louis University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
His research interests and scholarship, center on public policy and leadership, technology and political sociology, urban affairs, and governance. He has also written about downtown revival, the politics of stadiums and convention centers, and urban tourism. Spirou's most recent books include Anchoring Innovation Districts: The Entrepreneurial University and Urban Change (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021) which focuses on innovation, higher education, economic development, and urban revitalization and the co-edited The Many Futures of Work: Rethinking Expectations and Breaking Molds (Temple University Press, 2021) that examines the technological, political, and economic sources of the gig economy, the impact of the rapidly changing labor economy, and ameliorative policy options. He is editor of the Johns Hopkins University Press Higher Education and the City book series.
Previous books include Building the City of Spectacle: Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Remaking of Chicago (with D. Judd) published by Cornell University Press in 2016, Urban Tourism and Urban Change: Cities in a Global Economy (Routledge, 2011), St. Charles: Culture and Leisure in an All-American Town (Arcadia, 2005) which received an Award of Merit by the Illinois Association of Museums, and It's Hardly Sportin': Stadiums, Neighborhoods and the New Chicago (Northern Illinois University Press, 2003, with L. Bennett).
Spirou's activities have received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, the Library of Congress, the Ford Foundation and the Sam Walton Foundation. He has worked on projects with the University of Athens, Hassan II University Morocco, the University of Heidelberg and Peking University.