Prof. Dr. Kata Beilin

Kata Beilin is a writer and researcher. She is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a faculty affiliate at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies; the Center for Culture, History, and Environment; the Latin American, Iberian, and Caribbean Studies Program; and the Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies.

Specializing in environmental cultural studies in the Hispanic world, Kata promotes transdisciplinary and collaborative research across different fields, including nonacademic partners and knowledges. She is particularly interested in how alliances between humans, plants, and animals in rural cultures and in the cultures of the forests play out in the debates on land use and agro-technologies. Her current project, led in collaboration with Sai Suryanarayanan, seeks new understandings of acceptance and resistance to GE crops in Argentina, Paraguay, Mexico, and other countries of the Hispanic world by developing novel concepts—interspecies alliance, interspecies resistance and interspecies re-existence—to attend to the intertwined dynamics between plants, insects, microbial communities, and human bodies in the debates over future agri-cultures. Her parallel solo book focuses on alternative economies and cultures of environmental renewal in Spain and Latin America that involve agro-ecology, feminist economies, and indigenous environmental ethics and philosophies.

RCC Research Project: Interspecies Resistance to Genetically Engineered Crops in Luso-Hispanic Agricultures

 Lunchtime Colloquium Video - Hispanic Agri-Cultures: Interspecies Alliance and Resistance to GM Crops

Selected Publications:

• with William Viestenz, eds. Ethics of Life: Contemporary Iberian Debates. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016.
• In Search of Alternative Biopolitics in Contemporary Spain: Anti-Bullfighting, Animality, and the Environment. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2015/2016.
• with Sainath Suryanarayanan. “The War Between Amaranth and Soy: Interspecies Resistance to Transgenic Soy Agriculture in Argentina.” Environmental Humanities 9, no. 2 (forthcoming, 2017).
• with Sainath Suryanarayanan. “Step out to Shadowtime, Hurry Like a Plant: Corporeal Time and Corporate Time for the Anthropocene Generation.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production in the Luso-Hispanic World 2, no. 6 (2016).
• “Ecology of a Change: Alternative Economies for Anthropocene in the Multispecies Context.” Ecozon@ 7, no. 2 (2016): 149–64.
• with Sainath Suryanarayanan. “Still Different?: Politics, Culture, and Biotechnology in Spain.” In Contemporary Iberian Debates, edited by Kata Beilin and William Vistienz, 203–29. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016.