Profile

Catalina Arango (Ph.D. New York University, 2019): before joining Princeton University in the fall of 2022, she taught translation and environmental humanities at Carnegie Mellon University. 

Her research explores the environmental imagination of Latin American and Colombian cultural production of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and its intersections with gender, colonialism, capitalism, and social and environmental movements. Her current book project examines the visions of the environment that appear in the different waves of “regionalist writing” of Colombian literature between 1920 and 2020 and their relationship to Colombia’s violent history. She argues that Colombia’s regionalist writing has articulated an imagination in which the environment appears as an entanglement of cultural discourse, communities, and struggles, that act as a political subject against violent forms of objectification.

Catalina has also worked as a Spanish and Portuguese translator for UNICEF, the Goethe Institute, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University. 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 chapters of Resistance Strategies by Diana Taylor and Marcos Steuernagel (eds.). Due to her work as a translator and her experience as an immigrant in Mexico, Portugal, and the United States, she is also interested in the relationship between language, migration, power relations, and identity in translation and auto-fictional writing.