Near the end of Department of English doctoral candidate Diana Little’s April 29, 2025 final public exam, after responding to faculty comments on the presentation of her dissertation, “Imperial Erosions: The Geological Poetics of Empire, 1780-1850,” Little said she wanted to give a shout out to Allison Carruth’s Blue Lab and to recommend checking out the lab’s original climate story projects, including its three original podcasts: Archival Ecologies, Carried by Water, and Mining for the Climate.
Carruth, professor of American studies and the High Meadows Environmental Institute, director of Princeton's Program in Environmental Studies, and director and principal investigator of Blue Lab, was attending the exam, seated across the Hinds Library seminar table from Little on a front row sofa alongside other English department graduate students.
The next afternoon, Carruth and Barron Bixler, creative director at Blue Lab and a professional specialist in the Effron Center for the Study of America, sat with doctoral candidate Kyra Morris’s dissertation committee at Morris’s final public exam, in which Morris presented on her dissertation, “Recovery: Writing at the Margins of the Great Acceleration.”
“Allison Carruth's Blue Lab has helped me develop my public-facing work,” Morris said. Morris noted that it was thanks to financial support from Blue Lab that she was able to attend the Orion Environmental Writers' workshop in the summer of 2022, which helped her kickstart a number of the public-facing writing projects she’s currently working on.
More importantly, though, Morris said, Carruth and Blue Lab members helped her workshop a magazine piece on the New Jersey Meadowlands that is now forthcoming in The Atlantic.
“Allison not only encouraged me to write this piece and gave me feedback on early versions of it,” Morris said, “but also taught me how to work the audio recording equipment that I used to do my reporting for the piece.”
“Allison is always responsive to new ideas for Blue Lab projects,” Morris said. “When I proposed writing a series of vignettes or "dispatches" that could be published on the Blue Lab site, she helped me get the project off the ground. Two of those dispatches have now been published, and two more are forthcoming. Barron Bixler created the web design for these dispatches — something I would not have been able to do on my own.”
Carruth and Bixler launched Blue Lab in 2021. An environmental research, storytelling and media group, the lab produces original story series and creative projects about how different communities make sense of environmental change, and in some cases irrevocable loss, in relationship to the places they love, value and call home.
As well as in graduate student work, English department connections with Carruth and Blue Lab are rooted in English majors’ environmental interests. Jamie Rodriguez ’24 worked on the production of Blue Lab podcasts as an HMEI intern in the summer of 2023. Noa Greenspan ’23 worked with Blue Lab as an inaugural HMEI intern to research and produce audio stories about her home region of coastal Virginia as the community reconfigures to face sea level rise and flooding.
In a natural extension of such connections, and a recognition of the deep interrelation of writing and the natural world, in January 2025 the Office of the Dean of the Faculty approved the vote of the Department of English faculty to offer Carruth associated faculty status.
Department of English Chair Simon Gikandi, the Class of 1943 University Professor of English, echoed Morris that Carruth will bring to the English department her expertise in contemporary climate storytelling in all its forms — science fiction, the visual arts, podcasting, documentary filmmaking, photography.
“Allison's interest in this diverse array of mediums will make her a resource for students who want to think and research beyond the printed page,” Morris said.
“Allison is an extraordinarily talented multidisciplinary scholar who has already made an indelible mark on Princeton’s campus," said William A. Gleason, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of English and American Studies. "She’s also an innovative bridge-builder who helps connect the humanities with the sciences and social sciences through her work and teaching. I’m delighted that she now has associated faculty status in the department.”
Carruth starts the introduction of her 2025 monograph Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech (Chicago) by quoting a group of scientists and science writers’ embrace of “the Earth we have created.” From there, Carruth cuts to a sensory recollection of running along the San Francisco Bay, the “musky scent of reeds, the rot of mud and muck”; her “past present, living on engineered ground in the shadow of the San Mateo Bridge,” feeling “unmoored.”
Over the next pages, Carruth fluidly interweaves quotations, personal and California history, and coinages (“Nature Remade, [is] capitalized throughout the book to evoke a patented technology or intellectual property,” Carruth notes).
“The ‘novel’ in Novel Ecologies,” Carruth writes, “encapsulates, at once, the California ethos of perpetual technological world-building and the global literary form of ‘the novel’, with the latter’s affordances in making storyworlds.”
After citing writer Amitav Ghosh’s surmise that “‘[I]t was exactly in the period in which human activity was changing the atmosphere’ […] that the modern novel came to eschew immense scales and improbable events by placing ‘ever-greater emphasis [on] everyday details, traits of character, or nuances of emotion,” Carruth begins the main body of Novel Ecologies with “a sustained consideration” of Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), highlighting its “ecological speculations: fictions that scale down the Anthropocene to dwell on localized experiences of its consequences, even as they craft expansive storyworlds that arc toward more sustaining forms of living.”
Calling A Tale for the Time Being “a touchstone” for what follows in the book, Carruth writes: “Placed in the pole position here, the novel offers a paradigmatic example of the works of narrative fiction that constitute one spine of Novel Ecologies and that serve to counter the technological utopianism of Nature Remade.”
“With Blue Lab, Carruth created a community for this kind of thinking,” Morris said. “The group brings together graduate students and postdocs with expertise in poetics, geology, hydrology, mapping, and cultural and environmental history. I imagine that Allison's presence in the English department will encourage interdisciplinary research and teaching.”