Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech

Mark your calendars and join a book talk by Professor Allison Carruth.

Novel Ecologies challenges the conviction that climate change and other environmental crises must be met with ever larger-scale forms of technological intervention. Against the new worlds conjured by Google, Meta, Open AI, Amazon, SpaceX, and a host of lesser-known start-ups, Carruth marshals writers and artists who imagine provisionally hopeful environmental futures while refusing to forget the histories that have made the world what it is.

Allison Carruth is a professor in the Program in American Studies and High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. Her current research interests include environmental narrative and science communication; the role of artists and writers in contemporary American environmental and food justice movements; and evolving relationships in the United States between technology and ecology. For over a decade, she has worked on collaborations that aim to bridge ideas from and re-imagine the boundaries between the arts, humanities, and sciences. She is the author of Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and co-author with Amy L. Tigner of Literature and Food Studies (Routledge, 2018), and Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech (University of Chicago Press, 2025).