Bellin, Stefano

Stefano Bellin is a tenure-track Professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from University College London (UCL), and before joining Pompeu Fabra University he worked at UCL, King’s College London, the University of Warwick, and Ghent University. He is a member of the Hannah Arendt Consortium at the University of Cambridge and of Cultural Memory Studies Initiative (CMSI) at Ghent University (see here for more information).

His research approaches contemporary literature as a laboratory of cultural and social analysis, as a way of seeing with specific theoretical and aesthetic “affordances”. Through this lens, he examines pressing global predicaments such as the crisis of political imagination, collective violence, international migration, and the ecological crisis. Drawing on literary and critical theory, his publications engage with a variety of subjects, including Primo Levi and Franz Kafka, the challenge of global responsibility, the politics of memory, Palestine-Israel, and the political potential of literature.

He is currently completing a monograph titled The Shame of Being Human: A Contrapuntal Reading of Primo Levi (under contract). Together with Simone Ghelli, he has co-edited a volume of essays that create a dialogue between Levi’s works and the contemporary world: Levi Beyond Levi: Creative Engagements with Primo Levi (Liverpool University Press; out in August 2026).

Bellin has also edited or co-edited five special issues of journals: Rethinking the Human–Animal Relation: New Perspectives in Literature and Theory (Paragraph, 2019; with Kevin Inston and Florian Mussgnug); Literature and Global Responsibility (Literature Compass, 2023); Feeling Implicated 1 & 2: Affect, Responsibility, Solidarity (double special issue of Parallax, 2023; with Jennifer Noji, Michael Rothberg, and Arielle Stambler); and Italian Amnesias: Multidimensional Forgetting in Contemporary Italy (Italian Culture, 2024; with Guido Bartolini).

He is currently editing three other special issues: Literature and Political Imagination: Expanding the Sense of the Possible (Comparative Critical Studies, 2026); Narratology and Memory Studies: Rekindling the Dialogue (Storyworlds, 2027); and Literature, Memory, and Political Imagination: Understanding the Past to Address the Future (Literature Compass, 2027).

Bellin’s research interests include contemporary world literature ‒ especially Anglophone, Hispanophone, Francophone, and Italian literatures ‒ Primo Levi, literary theory, cultural memory, theories of collective responsibility, the question of political imagination, Palestine-Israel, the intersections between literature and continental philosophy. More broadly, he is interested in literature as a theoretical tool for thinking cultural and social questions in the contemporary world. He welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students interested in these areas.

For more information, please visit his Academia page