Rate My Professor Maria Puig de la Bellacasa

María Puig de la Bellacasa is a Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, contributing to the field of Social Science through interdisciplinary approaches. She holds a PhD and an MA in Philosophy, along with an MSc in Transdisciplinary Studies, all obtained from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Puig de la Bellacasa joined UCSC's History of Consciousness in September 2023. Prior to this, she was an Associate Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick, from 2018 to 2023, and an Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor at the School of Management, University of Leicester, from 2010 to 2018. Her earlier appointments include a Marie Curie International Research Fellowship at the Department of History of Consciousness and the Center for Cultural Studies at UCSC from 2006 to 2008, and an ARC Research Fellowship at the Department of Philosophy, Université Libre de Bruxelles, from 1998 to 2002. She has held major fellowships such as the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellowship, an EU Marie Curie Fellowship, and Belgian Government ARC Research Fellowships, and served as a research associate at the School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, and visiting scholar at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University.

Puig de la Bellacasa's academic interests lie at the intersection of science and technology studies, feminist theory, and environmental humanities, with a focus on ecological cultures, human-soil relations, care ethics, decolonial ecologies, and speculative thinking. With a background in contemporary continental philosophy, constructivist and process philosophies, her earlier research addressed feminist epistemologies and the politics of knowledge production in scientific practice and technological innovations. Key publications include her monograph Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (University of Minnesota Press, 2017); co-edited collections Ecological Reparation: Repair, Remediation and Resurgence in Social and Environmental Conflict (Bristol University Press, 2023) with Dimitris Papadopoulos and Maddalena Tacchetti, and Reactivating Elements: Chemistry, Ecology, Practice (Duke University Press, 2021) with Dimitris Papadopoulos and Natasha Myers; as well as journal articles such as "Making time for soil: Technoscientific futurity and the pace of care" (Social Studies of Science, 2015) and "The re-animation of soil: transforming human-soil relations across science, culture and community" (The Sociological Review, 2019), which received the 2020 Article of the Year Prize from the Finnish Society for Aesthetics. She is currently authoring When the Name for World is Soil: Transforming Human-Soil Affections Through Science, Culture and Community.