Profile

Catalina Arango-Correa (Ph.D., New York University; M.A. Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City; B.A., Universidad Javeriana, Bogota) joined Princeton University in 2022.

Her teaching experience includes a variety of courses on Latin American culture and ecology, applied translation, and Spanish language courses. Among her teaching interests are imaginaries and discourses on and from Amazonia; Latin American cultural production and its relationship with rurality, indigeneity, maroonism, extractive capitalism, gender, human rights, and the rights of nature; applied translation, cultural approaches to translation, and community-engaged translation (Spanish - English); the relationship between translation, migration and displacement; and cultural studies and environmental humanities in the Spanish language classroom.

Her research focuses on Colombian cultural production and its intersections with nation-building, extractive capitalism, rurality, indigeneity, gender, war, and memory. Her first book project examines the work of three Colombian "regionalist" writers of the first half of the 20th century--José Eustasio Rivera, César Uribe Piedrahíta, and Manuel Zapata Olivella-- and their imagination of a living and agent "nature" as an integral part of the political amid Latin America's and Colombia's first "Export Age" of commodities. Recently, she has been interested in the materialist and ontological imagination of Colombian Amazonian novels of the early twentieth century; the revival of "regionalist" topoi in the contemporary fictionalization of extractivism and violence in Colombia; and the ecofeminist imaginations and memorializations of Colombia's history of extraction and war in the work of Colombian authors.

Catalina has also worked as an art administrator in the Colombian public sector; external evaluator and editor for trade-book presses in Colombia and Mexico; academic editor for NYU's Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics; and English-to-Spanish, English-to-Portuguese, and Portuguese-to-Spanish translator for different organizations and institutions (UNICEF, the Goethe Institute, the Center for Reproductive Rights, NYU). She is also the Spanish translator of the scholarly books The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives by Macarena Gómez-Barris, Out of the Archives and into the Streets: El Cusco de Martín Chambi by Silvia Spitta, and Resistance Strategies by Diana Taylor and Marcos Steuernagel (eds.). Before joining Princeton, she taught at Carnegie Mellon University and New York University. 

Catalina will be delighted to work with undergraduate students interested in socio-environmental issues in Latin America and Amazonia; eco-cultural and ecofeminist aesthetics; Colombia's history or cultural production; applied translation and/or community-engaged translation (English - Spanish); and any other related topics.