Rate My Professor Allison Carruth

Allison Carruth is a professor in the Effron Center for the Study of America and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University, positions she has held since 2021. In these roles, she also serves as Director of the Program in Environmental Studies since 2024 and as Director and Principal Investigator of Blue Lab since 2021. Prior to Princeton, Carruth was Professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 2012 to 2020, where she founded and directed the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) from 2016 to 2020. Her earlier academic appointments include Assistant Professor of English and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon from 2008 to 2012 and Associate Director of Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University from 2011 to 2012. Carruth holds a PhD from Stanford University (2008) and a BA from Grinnell College (1997).

Her scholarship examines environmental narrative and science communication, the contributions of artists and writers to American environmental and food justice movements, digital culture and high-tech environmentalism, and art-science collaborations. Carruth is the author of Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech (University of Chicago Press, 2025) and Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (Cambridge University Press, 2013). She co-authored Literature and Food Studies with Amy L. Tigner (Routledge, 2018). Selected publications include “Wily Ecologies: Comic Futures for American Environmentalism” in American Literary History (2018), “Open Source Foodways: Agricultural Commons and Participatory Art” in ASAP/Journal (2016), and “The Digital Cloud and the Micropolitics of Energy” in Public Culture (2014). Her work has appeared in leading journals such as PMLA, Modernism/modernity, and Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. Through her leadership of Blue Lab and LENS, Carruth fosters interdisciplinary collaborations bridging humanities, arts, and sciences to address contemporary environmental challenges.