Shapiro Distinguished Lecture: Bathsheba Demuth, Brown University

April 2, 2025 at 5pm

The 2024-25 Shapiro Initiative on Environment and Society Distinguished Lecture will be offered by Bathsheba Demuth on April 2, 2025 at 5:00 pm in the John Hope Franklin Room (SSRB 224). 

Her talk, “History from the Dogsled: Animals, Climates, and the Stakes of Telling the Past,” examines how something as seemingly unlikely as animal emotions helped shape the contours of the British and Russian empires as they attempted to colonize what is now Alaska and makes an argument for the stakes of reading the past for new kinds of subjectivity, affect, and action—for new definitions of what and who counts as part of how history is made.

Demuth is the Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society, Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University. Her work focuses on the environmental history of the Russian and North American Arctic and she is author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, published by W. W. Norton (2019). Demuth completed her PhD in history at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently working on a project titled The Long Water: A Biography of the Yukon River that “examines how legal ideas—from where law originates to private property, rights to hunt or fish, and Indigenous land claims—and the ecology of the Yukon River mingled and changed each other over the past 200 years.”