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 currently directs the Program in Environmental Studies and is the co-founder and faculty director of the environmental media and storytelling group Blue Lab. 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.
For over a decade, her scholarship and creative practice have re-imagined the boundaries between the arts, humanities and sciences. Collaborative projects have been central to this work—from the Food Justice Conference to Play the LA River. From 2016-2020, she was the founding director of UCLA’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). While leading LENS, she was an executive producer of a story series featuring original essays and documentary films and developed in partnership with KCET, the country's largest public media outlet.
She is the author of three book: 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). She has begun two new book projects connected to the work of Blue Lab, respectively titled "The Ocean Remade" and "Nature and Technology in the Age of AI."
Her articles have appeared in American Literary History, ASAP/Journal, Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/ modernity, 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.