Allison Carruth

Allison Carruth is on the faculty at Princeton University, where she is Professor in the Effron Center for the Study of America and High Meadows Environmental Institute At Princeton, Allison directs Blue Lab and the lab's Climate Stories Incubator. Blue Lab's multidisciplinary team develops research-driven stories and creative projects about lived experiences of large-scale environmental issues—from climate change and green energy to multispecies justice and food and water futures. Blue Lab's team is currently working on projects in California, New Jersey, the mid-Atlantic, British Columbia, the Philippines, and Paiute and Shoshone lands in northern Nevada. For fifteen years, Allison's research and creative work have re-imagined the boundaries between the arts, humanities and sciences toward tackling complex environmental and climate problems. 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 Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). While leading LENS, she was an executive producer of an environmental story series developed in partnership with KCET, the country's largest public media outlet. Allison has a PhD from Stanford and is the author of two books and dozens of articles. Her latest book, Novel Ecologies, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey with her husband and son.

Research as creative practice, research universities as incubators for transformative change