Allison Carruth is a Professor at Princeton University in the American Studies Program and High Meadows Environmental Institute.
Her current research interests include environmental narrative and science communication; the role of artists and writers in American environmental and food justice movements; and evolving relationships in the United States between technology and ecology. For over a decade, she has worked on collaborations that aim to bridge ideas from and re-imagine the boundaries between the arts, humanities, and sciences. At present, she is completing a book project entitled Novel Ecologies. Under contract with the University of Chicago Press, Novel Ecologies compares popular and peer- reviewed science, visual culture, and imaginative literature to argue that a new imagination of nature has developed out of confrontations over the last four decades between engineering and environmentalism. The project terms this imagination nature remade, a framework centered on the West Coast that increasingly influences a wide range of fields, from architecture and civil engineering to molecular biology, geoscience, and conservation.
She is the author of Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (Cambridge 2013) and co-author with Amy L. Tigner of Literature and Food Studies (Routledge 2018). A co-founder of the multimedia public engagement project Play the LA River, she is involved in ongoing collaborations with artists, scientists and media makers.
