Bellamy Mitchell
Bellamy Mitchell, CSRPC/CSGS Joint Dissertation Fellow
Bellamy is a PhD candidate jointly-affiliated with the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. Bellamy’s research and teaching interests include modern and contemporary American, Canadian, and Indigenous literatures, theories of affect and emotion, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and theories of language and law. Their dissertation project, “A Poetics of Apology” makes a case for considering apologies as a formal and narrative genre by expanding the archive of the “apologetic” to deliberately consider apologies that are often excluded or neglected by scholarship: confessions, defense speeches, ironic and insincere apologies, and more quotidian social apologetics across racialized and gendered power dynamics. They track the form of the apology from its traditional iterations in political and legal discourses into a contemporary archive of performance art, anthropological and sociological studies, public monuments, institutional and museum protocols, and customer service policies, alongside works of 20th and 21st Century literature. This juxtaposition reveals a long history of apologies as performances that are more useful and productive as fraught social interactions, creatively and subversively employed across various situations of harm and structural inequalities, which are productive in their failures and “insincerity” as well as in their “successful” monologic performances.
Bellamy holds an MA in English Language & Literature from the University of Chicago and a BA with Honors in Philosophy and Creative Writing from Georgetown University. At the University of Chicago, they have received fellowships from the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights.