Allison Carruth
Professor of American studies and environmental studies, Princeton University
Allison Carruth is Professor in the Effron Center for the Study of America and High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University, where she directs Blue Lab and the lab's Climate Stories Incubator. She is the author of Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (Cambridge UP, 2013), Literature and Food Studies (with Amy L. Tigner, Routledge 2017), and Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech (University of Chicago Press, 2025). From 2016-2020, she was the founding faculty director of the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) at UCLA. She has published scholarship widely in venues such as Agriculture and Human Values, ASAP Journal (Arts of the Present), Modernism/modernity, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association, Public Culture, and Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. Her current research areas include the cultural dimensions of climate change and climate action, established and emerging forms of environmental narrative, new media, and evolving relationships between environmentalism, environmental science and technology in a contemporary US context.
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Nature by Design
November 18, 2019
Proposals to revive and reintroduce extinct species—known as de-extinction—garner outsize attention in discussions of biodiversity loss and climate adaptation. “Nature by Design” compares the scientific literature and popular science around de-extinction as it has been envisioned in the U.S. and considers its complicated relationship to the discourse of rewilding cities, farmlands, forests and parks.