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 production studio. Her areas of research, writing and creative practice currently include environmental media, climate storytelling, the environmental narratives and impacts of tech, blue humanities and ocean and coastal environmental futures (with a focus on the Eastern Pacific and California).
For over a decade, her scholarship and creative practice have bridged ideas from and reimagined the boundaries between the environmental arts, humanities and 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/producer of an environmental series featuring original essays and documentary films, developed in partnership with KCET, 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.