UT Humanities Center Tenth Annual Distinguished Lecture Series – Allison Carruth

Nature remade: The Power of Tech in Contemporary Environmentalism

"Nature remade" addresses a strain of environmental thought centered on the West Coast that is simultaneously neocolonial and futuristic. Ecosystems must be technologically retrofitted to sustain privileged modes of human life. Professor Carruth questions ideas of wilderness and the pastoral that have long shaped the American environmental imagination, while showing the allure of "making new nature" via climate engineering. She considers how contemporary writers and artists question the power of tech in contemporary environmentalism.

Allison Carruth is professor of American Studies and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. Her research interests include environmental narrative, media and art; science communication; contemporary food movements; and evolving relationships between technology, ecology and environmentalism in American culture.  She was the founding director of UCLA’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). At Princeton, she directs the Environmental Media Lab. The author of Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (Cambridge UP 2013) and co-author of Literature and Food Studies (Routledge 2018), she is currently completing a book titled Novel Ecologies. 

Free and open to the public, but registration is required.