Allison Carruth is on the faculty at Princeton University, where she is a professor in the Effron Center for the Study of America and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. At Princeton, she directs the Program in Environmental Studies and leads Blue Lab, an environmental media and storytelling studio. Her research and teaching areas include climate storytelling, environmental art and narrative, contemporary food movements and the evolving relationships between technology and environmentalism in American culture.
Her fields of research and teaching encompass the environmental humanities, ecomedia and science and technology studies. Over the past fifteen years, her scholarship and creative practice have aimed to bridge the work of environmental imagination and that of the natural sciences. From 2016-2020, she was the founding faculty director of UCLA’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). While leading LENS, she was an executive producer of a documentary series that produced films and web stories about L.A. environmental challenges. The series was developed in partnership with KCET/ PBS SoCal, the country's largest public media outlet.
She is the author of three books: Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (Cambridge UP 2013); Literature and Food Studies, with Amy L. Tigner (Routledge 2018); and Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech (University of Chicago Press 2025).
Her articles have appeared in American Literary History, ASAP/Journal, Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/ modernity, npj: Climate Action, Parallax, Public Culture, Public Books, PMLA and Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, among other places. She has been supported by ArtPlace America, the National Science Foundation, Princeton University, UCLA, the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) and the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics.