People

Professor of American Studies and Environmental Studies; Blue Lab Director and Principal Investigator

Allison Carruth

Allison Carruth is Professor of American Studies and Environmental Studies at Princeton University, where she directs Blue Lab. The lab is jointly supported by the Effron Center for the Study of American and the High Meadows Environmental Institute.

For over a decade, her research and creative practice have bridged ideas from and re-imagined the boundaries between the environmental arts, humanities and sciences. Collaborative projects have been central to this work—from the Food Justice Conference to Play the LA River. From 2016-2020, she was the founding director of UCLA’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). While leading LENS, she was an executive producer of an environmental series featuring original essays and documentary films, developed in partnership with KCET, the country’s largest public media outlet. She is the author of Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (Cambridge 2013) and co-author of Literature and Food Studies (Routledge 2018). Her book Novel Ecologies is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press (2024). Her work has been supported by ArtPlace America, the National Science Foundation, the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics.

Blue Lab Creative Director & Project Mentor; Professional Specialist, Effron Center for the Study of America

Barron Bixler

Barron Bixler is a social-environmental documentary photographer, writer, designer and curator. He is Creative Director at Blue Lab and holds a Professional Specialist appointment in Princeton University’s Effron Center for the Study of America. Barron’s photographs, writings, and other art and design projects have been featured in BOOM: A Journal of California, Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies, Analog Forever Magazine, Civil Eats, KCET Artbound, Dwell, LAist, KUSC Arts Alive, the Fresno Bee and the Stockton Record.

Postdoctoral Fellow, HMEI

Jayme Collins

Jayme Collins is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the High Meadows Environmental Institute. She is at work on both a book project and a podcast. The book is titled “Composing in the Field: Situated Poetries and Environments” and is about post-1960s avant garde poetry, imperialism and land use. The podcast investigates the interfaces between archives and ecology, from climate crises to conceptualizations of preservation. She writes about the intersections between literature, art and the environmental present. Her work can be found in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Wordsworth Circle and Jen Bervin: Shift, Rotate, Reflect.

PhD candidate, English

Diana Little

Diana Little is a PhD candidate in the Department of English. Before coming to Princeton, she earned her B.A. from McGill University and her MSt in English (1700-1830) from Jesus College, Oxford. Her research interests include transatlantic Romanticisms, poetry and poetics, history of science, ecocriticism, empire, and indigenous literatures. She has recently published an article about Wordsworth’s ecological poetics in the European Romantic Review.

Her dissertation project, “Imperial Erosions: The Geological Poetics of Empire in Britain and America, 1780-1850,” explores how poets and writers such as Erasmus Darwin, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, William Cullen Bryant, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and George Perkins Marsh explore the intersections between poetry, geology, and empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It argues that the emergence of geology in the late eighteenth century not only provided poets new ways of reading the earth, but new ways of reading the rise and fall – or rather the uplift and erosion – of empire.

PhD candidate, English

Kyra Morris

Kyra Morris is a fifth year PhD candidate in the English Department. Her dissertation, “Landscapes of Loss, Forms of Recovery: Writing at the Margins of the Great Acceleration,” asks how twentieth and twenty-first century poets and non-fiction writers use the boundary between literary and non-literary forms as a site for recovering meaning from landscapes marked by industry and violence. Her own work seeks to unsettle the boundary between critical and creative writing. With Blue Lab, she is working on a story about the New Jersey Meadowlands—20,000 acres of salt marsh defined by the Hackensack and Passaic Rivers. Since they became the garbage dump for New York City in the nineteenth century, the Meadowlands have been the site of difficult to quantify amounts of dumping as well as the site of development and speculation—a wasteland land that somebody always wanted to “reclaim” or “redeem.” This project will ask whether it’s possible to tell a different story. Kyra’s work has been published in the journal Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment.

Postdoctoral Fellow, HMEI

Jessica Ng

Jessica Ng is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the High Meadows Institute and member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice investigating how popular narratives of climate action are shaped in the interaction between environmental science and visual culture, and between land and labor movements. She has a PhD in Earth Science from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, where she studied Pleistocene paleoclimate using ice cores and groundwater. In and out of the lab, she experiments with science and art as tools for resistance, for education, and for creating a world in which many worlds fit. Her public work can be found in Science for the People and The Hopper.

HMEI Intern, Summer 2023

Alex Norbrook ’26

Alex Norbrook (he/him) is a sophomore studying history, politics, and environmental studies. Drawn to questions of capitalism, climate justice, and consumption, he is involved in Blue Lab’s “Mining for the Climate” project to uncover the competing narratives around lithium extraction and its social, environmental, and political impacts in the context of national urgency towards decarbonization. Alex is also a co-coordinator of Divest Princeton, bringing to light Princeton’s connections with the fossil fuel industry.

Postdoctoral Fellow, HMEI

Nathaniel Otjen

Dr. Nathaniel Otjen (he/they) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. At Blue Lab, he co-leads the project “Mining for the Climate,” a public-facing audio series that examines the contestations over narrative and futurity that have developed at sites of lithium extraction and renewable technology. An interdisciplinary environmental humanist, he specializes in environmental justice studies, multispecies ethnography, and life-writing literature. His research examines how the logics and structures of liberal humanism, anthropocentrism, colonialism, and neoliberalism sever human-nonhuman relationships. Taking up literature, science, and the arts, he proposes alternative modes of being that support human and nonhuman lives, in all their complexity and specificity. Dr. Otjen is currently working on his first book, Entangled Lives: Multispecies Selves, Justice, and Narratives, which conceptualizes modes of selfhood and justice premised upon multispecies entanglement and reciprocity. His published research can be read in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Resilience, Journal of Modern Literature and Configurations, among others.

To learn more, please visit nathanielotjen.com.

PhD candidate, Geosciences

Gemma Sahwell

Gemma Sahwell is a PhD student in the Geosciences department, where she uses stable isotope geochemistry as a tool to study the efficacy of shallow-water carbonate rocks as archives of global scale climate changes through Earth’s history. She became interested in the Environmental Media Lab as an extension of her scientific research, driven by the question of accessibility of scientific knowledge to wider audiences outside of the academy and experiments with auditory and visual modes of communication. Gemma is interested in bringing together new and old media with environmental science knowledge to tell compelling stories about earth’s past and our potential collective futures.

Postdoctoral Fellow, HMEI

Mario Soriano

Mario Soriano received his PhD in Hydrology and Water Resources from Yale University. His research draws on theoretical frameworks and methodologies from hydrogeology, sustainability science and applied data science to examine the movement of water and contaminants, and their intersections with human activities and values. His interests revolve around the linkages between water as a natural resource, an environmental driver and a pillar of well-being. He has experience in collaborative projects exploring the water-energy nexus, public health, indigenous agroecology, environmental justice and science communication. Within the Environmental Media Lab, Mario explores connections between hydrological model projections, uncertainty and emerging narratives of water futures embedded in various forms of knowledge and environmental storytelling.