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 and directs the environmental research, storytelling and art 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 Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (Cambridge UP 2013) and co-author with Amy L. Tigner of Literature and Food Studies (Routledge 2018). Her current book, Novel Ecologies, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. She has begun two new projects connected to the work of Blue Lab, respectively titled "Nature after Tech, A California Story" and "Living with Climate Crisis."
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.