Academic position: Visiting Research Fellow (from October 2021 Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick)
Department: Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS)
Email: s.bellin@ucl.ac.uk
Website: https://stefanobellin.academia.edu
Biography
My research focuses on the environmental humanities, transcultural memory studies, theories of collective responsibility, and on how contemporary literature addresses questions of racial and social justice. I am currently working on my first monograph, The Shame of Being Human: A Philosophical Reading of Primo Levi, which is due to be published in 2022. My second book project is entitled Global Responsibility: Implicated Subjects and the Shame of the World and it aims to explore how contemporary literature can help us to develop a theoretical framework that enhances our understanding of global responsibility. ‘Global’ stands here both for worldwide and comprehensive: it draws attention to our global relations of interdependency and to the complex networks of actions and inactions that create the conditions of possibility for large-scale violence and discrimination. A significant part of this research deals with the question of how many of us, through our living styles and patterns of consumption, are implicated in the ‘slow violence’ of anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation, and in the way in which they compromise the life conditions of future generations.
Research Projects
- ‘Humanity & Animality in 20th and 21st Century Cultures’ (international conference organized at UCL in 2014)
- Special issue of the journal Paragraph (Edinburgh University Press, vol. 42, no. 1, 2019) on critical animal studies and the Anthropocene, co-edited with Dr Kevin Inston and Professor Florian Mussgnug: https://www.euppublishing.com/toc/para/42/1
- Research project: Global Responsibility: Implicated Subjects and the Shame of the World (will be developed through a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship)