Department of History

Bathsheba Demuth is a 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 first book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), her writing has appeared in publications from The American Historical Review to The New Yorker and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She has a B.A. and M.A. from Brown University, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. With the support of a Carnegie Fellowship, she is currently writing a biography of the Yukon River watershed.