Assistant Professor Brent Ryan Bellamy
PhD (Alberta)
Traill College, bbellamy@trentu.ca
Brent Ryan Bellamy is an Assistant Professor (limited term appointment) of Speculative Literature in the Department of English and the Department of Cultural Studies at Trent University.
Most recently a Canada Research Chair postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta, Bellamy has previously been a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellow at Memorial University of Newfoundland from 2015 to 2017. While at MUN he conducted a research program under the title Petrorealism and Other Energy Narratives: A Literary History of the Age of Oil. Bellamy completed his doctorate at the University of Alberta in 2014 with a dissertation titled Residues of Now: The Cultures and Politics of Contemporary U.S. Post-Apocalyptic Novels.
Bellamy currently studies genre, narrative, US literature and culture, speculative fiction, and the cultures of energy. Two central questions motivate his work: What does it mean to imagine alternative energy futures? How can we best understand the social relations, infrastructures, and politics of fossil fuels in order to move beyond them? He is currently taking up these questions in three projects: the book project Remainders of the American Century: Post-Apocalyptic Novels in the Age of US Decline (under advanced contract with Wesleyan UP); a co-edited book Loanwords to Live With: An Ecotopian Lexicon (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) with Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, which features 30 short entries on loanwords from science fiction and ecological struggles; and a co-edited special issue of Science Fiction Studies on Climate Crisis with Veronica Hollinger (Nov. 2018).
Bellamy’s work has appeared in Mediations, Paradoxa, Science Fiction Film and Television, Western American Literature, Blindfield Journal, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, and in the edited collections Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (Wesleyan UP), Time, Globalization, and Human Experience (Routledge 2016), and Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham UP 2017). He has co-edited a special issue of Postmodern Culture (January 2016), a special issue of Reviews in Cultural Theory (February 2016, http://reviewsinculture.com/archive/volume-6-issue-3/), and a special issue of Mediations (http://www.mediationsjournal.org/toc/critique_of_energy) and book both titled Materialism and the Critique of Energy (MCM′ Press, Summer 2018, http://www.mcmprime.com/books/marxism-and-energy).
Bellamy is Managing Editor of Imaginations : revue d’études interculturelles de l’image/Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies (http://imaginations.glendon.yorku.ca/). You can follow Bellamy’s work at brentryanbellamy.com.