Professor Bellamy’s passions are challenging her students to engage ideas and perspectives different from their own and facilitating their development of the critical thinking and oral and written communication skills necessary for success in all areas of life. Her student-oriented teaching style features interactive class discussions, collaborative learning activities, and reading selections from a variety of literary genres. She teaches African American, Diasporic, and Multi-Ethnic American literatures, with an emphasis on women writers, and has taught courses in the undergraduate and graduate English programs, the Macaulay Honors College, and the Verrazano School. She serves as Director of the program in African and African Diaspora Studies. Her current research focus is representations of slavery in contemporary US literature and popular culture.
Degrees
Ph.D., English, Rutgers University
M.A., English, Rutgers University
M.A., English, Middlebury College
A.B., Economics, Harvard University
Professor Bellamy is the editor of Black Prominence and Black Precarity in Twenty-first Century African American Literature and Culture (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, 2025) and co-editor (with Karen Weingarten) of Inheritance, a special issue of Woman’s Studies Quarterly (Spring/Summer 2020). Her book, Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction (University of Virginia Press 2015), analyzes narrative representations of inherited traumatic memory as a critical means of social analysis in our increasingly mobile, global, and often traumatized culture.
Professor Bellamy has been the recipient of numerous research awards and fellowships including PSC-CUNY Research Awards, the CUNY Black Race and Ethnic Studies Research Faculty Fellow program, the Faculty Fellowship Publication Program, the American Association of University Women’s American Fellowship, and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Humanistic Studies. She has presented papers and organized panel discussions on twenty-first century African American literature and culture, contemporary representations of slavery, traumatic memory, and cultural identity at literary conferences throughout the United States.
Other publications include:
“Playing with Time: Inhabiting the Middle Space in Contemporary Narratives of Slavery.” Black Prominence and Black Precarity in Twenty-First Century African American Literature and Culture (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, 2025).
“From Her ‘Little Middle Place’: Edwidge Danticat’s Diasporic Identity and Poetics.” In Narrating History, Home, and Nation: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat. Eds. Maia Butler, Joanna Davis-McElligatt, and Megan Feifer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2022. 13-25.
"Haunting the African Diaspora: Responsibility and Remaining in Caryl Phillips' Crossing the River." African American Review 47.1 (2014): 129-144.
“More than Hunter or Prey: Duality and Traumatic Memory in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker.” MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 37.1 (2012): 177-197.
“‘These Careful Words … Will Talk to Themselves:’ Textual Remains and Reader Responsibility in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.” In Contested Boundaries: New Critical Essays on the Fiction of Toni Morrison. Ed. Maxine Montgomery. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. 14-32.
