Professor Bellamy’s passions are to challenge her students to engage ideas and perspectives different from their own and to facilitate 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 a variety of types of assessment. She teaches African American, Multi-Ethnic American, and Diasporic 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.
Professor Bellamy’s research focuses on how traumatic history is represented in the writings of contemporary Ethnic and African American women writers and examines the power of narrative to transform our understanding of self and traumatic experience. 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, or narratives of postmemory, as a critical means of social analysis in our increasingly mobile, global and often traumatized culture.
Degrees
Ph.D., English, Rutgers University
M.A., English, Rutgers University
M.A., English, Middlebury College
A.B., Economics, Harvard University
Professor Bellamy has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including PSC-CUNY Research Awards, the Dean’s Summer Scholarship, 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 on traumatic memory, postmemory, gender, and cultural identity in Multi-Ethnic and African American literatures at conferences throughout the United States.
Other publications include:
"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.
"Controlled Communication and Care: The Quest for Intimacy in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother I’m Dying." The Explicator 71:2 (2013): 99-102.
Last Updated: 01.15.2016
