April 13, 2023
Noon to 1:30 p.m.
The Faculty Club
In the nineteenth century, moving in the Arctic often meant working with dogs. Combining archives, fieldwork, oral histories, and animal behavioral sciences, this talk 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. In doing so, the talk 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.
Biography
Bathsheba Demuth is writer and environmental historian specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interest in northern places and cultures began when she was 18 and moved to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon, where she trained huskies for several years. From the archive to the dog sled, she is interested in how the histories of people, ideas, and ecologies intersect. In addition to her prize-winning book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, her writing has appeared in publications from The American Historical Review to The New Yorker and The Best American Science and Nature Writing.