I am currently serving as Associate Director of the Program in Science, Technology and Society at Stanford University. Beginning in fall 2012, I will join the faculty at UCLA as assistant professor of English.

My major fields are twentieth-century American literature, contemporary fiction, science and technology studies, food studies, and environmental criticism. In my scholarship, I focus on two developments that have shaped American literature and visual culture in the period since the Second World War: the industrialization of food systems and the commercialization of biotechnologies. My first book is American Power and the Literature of Food (under contract with Cambridge University Press); and I am co-authoring a book entitled Literature and Food Studies with Amy L. Tigner (under contract with Routledge in the Literature and Contemporary Thought series). I am currently working on a second monograph project entitled “The Transgenic Age,” which compares forms of contemporary fiction, poetry, and bioart that explore the consequences and horizons of life science research (particularly in the area of genetic engineering).

I am the co-organizer of the Food Justice Conference and the Book Review Editor for Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. Recent publications include essays in Modern Drama, Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/Modernity, and Postmodern Culture and in book collections from Oxford UP and Routledge. I have a forthcoming essay in the journal Parallax.

©2012 Allison Carruth