K. Bellamy Mitchell researches and teaches modern and contemporary American, Canadian, and Indigenous literatures and artwork in conversation with theories of affect and emotion, psychoanalysis, critical theory, theories of language and law, and models of transformative justice. Their doctoral dissertation, A Poetics of Apology, theorizes apology as a capacious genre by reading precisely 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 that this genre is used to a variety of effects in politics, literature, and daily life. They track the form of the apology from its more procedural iterations in political and legal discourse, and historical antecedents in classical literature, into a contemporary archive of performance art, public monuments, and institutional policies alongside works of 20thand 21st Century literature—reading works of literature by James Agee, Walker Evans, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, poetry by Layli Long Solider, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Lee Maracle, and Claudia Rankine, queer performance art by Vaginal Davis, José Munoz, Adrian Piper, the Waitresses, AA Bronson, and Adrian Stimson, and public conversations between James Baldwin and Margaret Meade. 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.

Bellamy 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.

Bellamy is affiliated with and also teaches courses in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and the Department of English. In 2024-2025, Bellamy 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.

Their website is available here: https://sites.google.com/uchicago.edu/bellamymitchell/