Bellamy Mitchell researches and teaches modern and contemporary American, Canadian, and Indigenous literatures and artwork in conversation with theories of language and law, psychoanalysis, critical theory, race and racialization, gender and sexuality, and models of transformative justice. Their doctoral dissertation, A Poetics of Apology, theorizes apology as a capacious genre by reading those apologies which are often dismissed as such—defense speeches, off-the-cuff quotidian apologetics, and infelicitous and ironic apologies—in order to examine the ways apologies are used to a variety of effects in politics, literature, and daily life. They write about how the narrative, relational, and transformative facets of apologies—and other literary and social rituals of undoing and repair—are deployed in the context of race relations, class and conversation, and scaled modes of address between indigenous artists and colonial nation-states.

Mitchell earned a PhD from the Department of English and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 2024, an MA in English Literature from the University of Chicago in 2021, and a BA with Honors in Philosophy and English from Georgetown University in 2015.

In 2024-2025, Mitchell will offer a course on “Aftermath: Literature of Reparation, Redress, Refusal and Change” in the Autumn, “Transformative Description: Faulkner, Hurston, and Modernist Ethnography,” in the Spring, and will teach part of the “Colonizations” sequence in the Winter.  

Website: https://sites.google.com/uchicago.edu/bellamymitchell/