Katarzyna Olga Beilin

Kata Beilin is a professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, and Director of the Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies (LACIS) program.  She is also affiliated to the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE), and the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Kata’s research spans the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America with a focus on environmental issues, alternative economies, time and memory, and indigenous epistemologies. Together with other Environmental Humanities scholars, she has launched an Environmental Cultural Studies platform that has produced interdisciplinary research and sparked debates published in three recent volumes that she has co-edited Ethics of Life; Contemporary Iberian Debates (Vanderbilt University Press, 2016), Polemical Companion to Ethics of Life (2016), and Environmental Cultural Studies Through Time in Luso-Hispanic World (forthcoming). She is ready to mentor students working on Spanish modern literature, culture, and film as well as environmentally focused Latin Americanists.

Her current projects include:

All that Matters; From the Iberian Crises to Alternative Economies of Life focuses on how the 2008 economic crisis has revealed exhaustion of human relationships with material environments and how these relations are transformed by alternative cultures and economies.

Interspecies; Resistance and Resurgence in Hispanic Rural Cultures (in collaboration with Science & Technology Studies scholar, Sainath Suryanarayanan) examines the scenarios where cultural resistance to industrial agriculture in Latin America is motivated by the awareness of threats for the plants, animals, forests, and waters that people not only rely upon in their daily lives, but that they consider as their partners and that form part of their identities.

EDUCATION

PhD, University of Chicago

SELECTED HONORS AND AWARDS

2018 PI. Bradshaw-Knight Foundation Grant

2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title for In Search of Alternative Biopolitics.
(Granted by American Librarian Association)

2017 Carson Fellowship, Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society, Münich

2017 Center for European Studies Research Grant, UW-Madison.

2016 Faculty Development Grant to Study Ecological Economics

2015 PI. Interdisciplinary Research Award, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Graduate Research & Education, UW-Madison.

2012 Institute for Research in the Humanities Resident Fellowship, UW-Madison.

2006 Wisconsin Teaching Fellow, UW-Madison.

2003 Honorary Membership in National Society of Collegiate Scholars
(Granted by student leadership of UW-Madison as a distinction in teaching)

2000-05 Vilas Young Investigator Award

SELECTED ARTICLES

“Bulls, Apes, Genes and Clouds.” Introduction to In Search of Alternative Biopolitics in Contemporary Spain; Anti-Bullfighting, Animality and the Environment. The Ohio State University Press, 2015/2016 Print. (Choice Outstanding Academic Title)

“Step out to Shadowtime, Hurry Like a Plant: Corporal Time and Corporate Time for the Anthropocene Generation” with Sainath Suryanarayanan. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production in the Luso-Hispanic World 2,6, (2016): 21- 42.

“Alternative Economies for Anthropocene; Change, Happiness and Future Scenarios.” Ecozon@ 7, 2, (2016): 149-64.

“Die and Laugh in the Anthropocene, Disquieting Realism and Dark Humor in Biutiful and Nocilla Experience.” Ethics of Life; Contemporary Iberian Debates. Vanderbilt University Press, 2016.

“Still Different? Politics, Culture and Biotechnology in Spain.” With Sainath Suryanarayanan. Contemporary Iberian Debates. Vanderbilt University Press, 2016.

“The War Between Amaranth and Soy: Interspecies Resistance to Transgenic Soy Agriculture in Argentina.” with Sainath Suryanarayanan. Environmental Humanities 9,2, Nov, 2017: 204-229.

“‘Broken Embraces’ Unearthing the Dead: On Amour Fou, Fatherhood and Memory.” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas. 46.4, Fall 2012.

“The Split Screen Syndrome: Structuring (Non)Seeing in Two Plays on Abu Ghraib.” Comparative Drama. 46.4, Winter 2012.

“Culture and Torture; Debates on Bullfighting in the Times of War on Terror.” International Journal of Iberian Studies. 25.1, July 2012.