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/

Joshua Trubowitz is a Social Sciences Teaching Fellow in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and the College. His current research centers on Aristotle’s theory of perception. He is especially interested in the idea, which he finds in Aristotle, that we are subject to normative evaluation in our cognitive lives only insofar as cognition features spontaneous or self-caused activity. More generally, he is interested in what we might have to learn from Aristotle about normativity, the soul, and its place in nature. He holds a joint-PhD from the Department of Philosophy and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and also received his AB from the University of Chicago.

Uday’s research and teaching focusses on the question of education and the promises and limits it holds in the collective pursuit of freedom. His dissertation “From the Abolition of Untouchability to a Philosophy of Liberatory Education: B. R. Ambedkar and W.E.B. Du Bois in Dialogue” brings into view the work of two central in the liberatory traditions of South Asian anti-caste political thought and Black political thought to argue that the two struggles were conceptually intertwined, and that their respective insights remain necessary for making possible universal political and social emancipation. He earned his PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 2023.

Deeply passionate about teaching and writing, Uday’s thinking and praxis as a scholar has been transformed by the feminist tradition across the world. Eve Ewing, Audre Lorde, Tressie McMillan-Cottom, Jenn M. Jackson, Shailaja Paik, V. Geetha, Elena Ferrante, and Vijeta Kumar, amongst many other feminist thinkers and comrades form the community – through their inspiration and intellectual clarity - that make possible his work.

Constantly thinking about the conditions of possibility for love and justice, Uday is also an organizer in the Chicago Mehfil (a Chicago-based South Asian performing arts space open to all and intent on breaking barriers imposed by caste in South Asia); was a proud organizer in the Graduate Student Union in UChicago and remains committed to the cause of worker-organising; and is now working to make visible and scale up the intimate but often invisibilised connection between the anti-caste movement in South Asia and the Black liberation movement the world over.

Read more about Professor Lerner here.

Read more about Professor Kass here.

Professor Wellbery's current research project is a large-scale study of Goethe’s literary work and scientific and aesthetic writings that centers on the concept of endogenous form. He is also preparing a monograph entitled Self-Relation: A Neo-idealist Theory of Literature. Read more about Professor Wellbery here.

University Professors are among those recruited at a senior level from outside the University and are selected for internationally recognized eminence in their fields as well as for their potential for high impact across the University. Read more about the recognition here.

Professor Tarcov's scholarly interests include history of political theory, education and family in political theory, and principles of U.S. foreign policy. Read more about his work here.

Professor Warren is an acclaimed poet, whose research interests include translation, literary biography, literature and the visual arts, and relations between classical and modern literature.

Read more about Professor Warren here.

Professor Pop is interested in the relation of art and science, in dramatic and narrative art (particularly in the classical tradition), and in how modernity deals with the past. These interests intersect with others in the logic of fiction, art historiography, cartoons, comics and caricatures, popular music and science fiction, beauty and ugliness.

Read more about Professor Pop here.