Allison Carruth
Professional website
Office: PLC 528
Phone: (541) 346-3567
My interests include environmental literature and media, modernist and postmodern culture, and globalization theory. I also have a longstanding interest in the literary and environmental history of food. My current book manuscript–"Global Appetites”–argues that the food system profoundly shapes aesthetic responses to globalization in U.S. and Anglophone culture from World War I to the present. 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.
Recent Publications
- "BioArt and Terreforms: A New Ethics for Biotechnology?" (Forthcoming)
- "Bog Lands and Digital Markets in Seamus Heaney's Late Poetry" (Forthcoming).
- "Compassion, Commodification and The Lives of Animals: J.M. Coetzee's Recent Fiction" in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, eds. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley, Oxford UP (2010).
- "War Rations and the Food Politics of Late Modernism," Modernism/Modernity (Winter 2010).
- "'The Chocolate Eater': Food Traffic and Environmental Justice in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby," Modern Fiction Studies, Special Issue: Environmental Crisis and the Future of Ecocriticism 55.3 (Fall 2009).
- "The Space Stage and the Circus," Modern Drama 51.4 (Winter 2008).
Works in Progress
- "Global Appetites: Food, Power and the Postindustrial Imaginary" (Book manuscript)
- "Environmental Culture from Genetic Art to Nanotechnology"
(Book project) - "Google's Earth: Energy in a Web 2.0 World" (Article)
