Allison Carruth, PhD

University of Oregon faculty profile

Allison Carruth is an Assistant Professor of English and a participating faculty member in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. Professor Carruth received her PhD from Stanford University in 2008, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Santa Barbara during the 2008-2009 academic year. Her research interests include environmental literature and media, modernist and postmodern culture, and globalization theory. She also has a longstanding interest in the literary and environmental history of food. Carruth's current book manuscript–"Global Appetites: Food, Power and the Postindustrial Imaginary"-argues that the food system profoundly shapes aesthetic responses to globalization in U.S. and Anglophone culture. If pastoral poetry and food primers historically have been the genres to take food seriously, "Global Appetites" demonstrates that the modern food system preoccupies an array of literary forms: modernist poetry, magical realist fiction, war posters, culinary prose, and journalistic exposé. Additional works in progress include an environmental critique of social networking media, an essay on Seamus Heaney’s recent poetry, and a second book project that traces artistic and literary interventions in the sciences of genetics and nanotechnology.