He was Professor Emeritus of Arabic Literature at the University of Michigan.
Bellamy has been an important scholar in the textual criticism of the Quran, even being described as the "doyen" of its emendation, and one of the few to practice emendation since Ignác Goldziher and Theodor Nöldeke.
[1][2][3] In a series of articles from 1973 to 2002 in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, Bellamy proposed a number of conjectural emendations to the standard text of the Quran.
[4] He gave a succinct description of his job as "the correction of errors in texts.
"[5] Bellamy's approach makes him a representative of the Revisionist School of Islamic Studies.