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Bathsheba Demuth

@brdemuth.bsky.social
12K followers 1.8K following 2.1K posts

Writer & environmental historian of cold places, now writing about the Yukon River. Author of FLOATING COAST. Prof at Brown University. Post mostly about animals, Arctic things & books. Heart is on a dogsled. #envhist #naturewriting

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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
“I find myself in the middle of translation, of overlapping colonial and anticolonial projects, as well as the learning of new/old languages. The Blind Man and the Loon illuminates the labors of language and the promise of story” A @sprucehen.bsky.social stunner placesjournal.org/article/blin...
placesjournal.org
Blind Man and Loon
A tale shared by Native peoples across the circumpolar Arctic reveals the elusive nature of language, and has come to shape many Native connections to place.
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Coming in February! An edited collection on rivers past and present and how they move. The code E27RIVER gets you 30% off a preorder from Duke. #envhist #rivers #envhum
Cover of the book Rivers on the Move, edited by Bathsheba Demuth, by Mark Healey, anyone Giacomo Pareinello & Laurence Smith. Cover shows white swirls of a river channel on a blue background
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Coming in February! An edited collection on rivers past and present and how they move. The code E27RIVER gets you 30% off a preorder from Duke. #envhist #rivers #envhum
Cover of the book Rivers on the Move, edited by Bathsheba Demuth, by Mark Healey, anyone Giacomo Pareinello & Laurence Smith. Cover shows white swirls of a river channel on a blue background
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Not a novel observation, but digging back into research full time is a real reminder that internet searching has deteriorated so much. My kingdom for Google circa 2014.
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
I have seen & learned & felt so many things this summer, including watching more black bears along the Yukon River than I can remember ever encountering before.
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Great review of a book I devoured in a few days 📚
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Luke LeBrun @lukelebrun.ca · 15/07/2026
These photos of FNs community members fleeing their homes by boat are genuinely apocalyptic (Photo via Wayne Wastaken of Collins, Ontario, who says his “hometown is gone”) www.facebook.com/share/r/1ArN...
Photo via Wayne Wastaken

Fire clouds over Collins, Ontario as community members flee their homes by boat
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
I am apparently in my Dad Disaster History summer reading-wise: so far, we have the Challenger space shuttle, Chernobyl, several shipwrecks, 1929, range of Nazis, and the mess at Waco. Other recommendations very welcome.
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Storm brewing on a Yukon River side channel in the delta — and some expert boating.
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𝐑𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐭 𝐌𝐨𝐨𝐫 @robertmoor.com · 06/07/2026
Excited to announce the (very swiftly) upcoming tour dates for the East Coast leg of my book tour! Can't wait to talk with all of these brilliant folks—including @brdemuth.bsky.social and @sandyernestallen.bsky.social—about tree-climbing and 'tree-thinking'.
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sarah mccarry @sarahmccarry.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
absolute stunner from @brdemuth.bsky.social on greenland + american empire; i was today years old when i learned grandpapa trump got his start as an extremely-used-horse salesman in the arctic www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...
nplusonemag.com
Strategic Amnesia | Bathsheba Demuth
Denying that history could have been otherwise or making conquest subject to some unwritten statute of limitations are both ways of cloaking not just the US’s imperial past but its continuation into t...
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Michael Ledger-Lomas @michaelledgerlomas.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Demuth has become one of the essential historians.
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
Back from an amazing week on the lower Yukon River and the Bering Sea, with so much dancing and talking and boating and sunshine and rain and even a few summer chum salmon from the test fishery. Many thanks to the people of Emmonak, St Mary’s, and Pilot Station for the welcome
View of the Yukon River from the air, with a large brown island in the foreground, silty whiteish water reflecting the clouds, and deep green land A green fishnet with a silver fish is pulled over the side of a metal boat by a person in camo rain gearA thunderhead brews over the Bering Sea with an eroding bank in the foreground and green grass growing on the edge of a flat island
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Venus Bivar @vbivar.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Well this is just bloody brilliant from @brdemuth.bsky.social on American empire and the Arctic. Was gob-smacked to read that 40% of US territory was purchased. Totally shifts the context for trying to buy Greenland. www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...
nplusonemag.com
Strategic Amnesia | Bathsheba Demuth
Denying that history could have been otherwise or making conquest subject to some unwritten statute of limitations are both ways of cloaking not just the US’s imperial past but its continuation into t...
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
On the long American tradition of buying sovereignty, Greenland, colonialism, an AI penguin, and the grimy history of the president’s grandfather in the far north www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...
nplusonemag.com
Strategic Amnesia | Bathsheba Demuth
Denying that history could have been otherwise or making conquest subject to some unwritten statute of limitations are both ways of cloaking not just the US’s imperial past but its continuation into t...
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Look what book is now *available* for preorder!! @rebecca-altman.bsky.social’s SONG OF STYRENE coming next April. Important and gorgeous. Also that cover!! #envhist #envhum #plastics www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-So...
simonandschuster.com
The Song of Styrene
A personal history of plastics, written by a plastic-maker’s daughter turned environmental sociologist who, for the past decade, has searched for t...
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Great bookmail to return home to! @robertmoor.com’s newest — and I’m very much anticipating discussing this gorgeous work with him on July 12 at RiffRaff in Providence 🌳🪾🌲
A photo of Robert Moor’s book, On Trees, with a green tree in the background
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Great bookmail to return home to! @robertmoor.com’s newest — and I’m very much anticipating discussing this gorgeous work with him on July 12 at RiffRaff in Providence 🌳🪾🌲
A photo of Robert Moor’s book, On Trees, with a green tree in the background
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
A gorgeous and exacting piece by Max Liboiron, on plastics and science and birds and much more placesjournal.org/article/thro...
placesjournal.org
Through the Guts
What can plastic fragments found in an animal’s digestive tract tell us about the waters it has traversed?
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Eva Holland @evaholland.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
Hi pals! I've got something I'm REALLY excited about in the works... I'll be editing a nonfiction anthology about the Yukon River. Timelines are tight so I'm mostly seeking out existing work (in your publication archive, sitting on your hard drive...) Please submit / share! forms.gle/Q622LYHExe7x...
A screengrab from the linked Google Form reads:

Submit Your Story: Yukon River anthology
Y1A Publishing is accepting submissions of nonfiction writing about the Yukon River!

DEADLINE TO SUBMIT: JUNE 30, 2026

We're looking for personal reflections, nature writing, travel writing... anything nonfiction that is neither strictly academic work nor hard-news journalism. We're hoping to build an anthology that ranges widely, with a diverse array of perspectives on the river from its headwaters all the way to the Bering Sea. 

Accepted stories that run less than 1500 words will be paid $250 CAD.
Accepted stories that run longer will be paid $500 CAD.
Previously published work is welcome, so long as you, the writer, retain the rights.
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Fox hunting on the banks of the Yukon in Whitehorse this morning
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Julien Vincent @julienvincent.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
En voilà un excellent article. La thèse ? Arrêtons avec « agentivité » à toutes les sauces en histoire environnementale et intéressons nous plutôt à la continuité : «  rien n’est peut-être plus radical que d’identifier dans le passé les conditions nécessaires à la continuité. »
terrestres.org
Comment écrire l’histoire environnementale aujourd'hui ?
Bathsheba Demuth · Baleines, virus, sols... Quelle rôle attribuer aux non-humains dans la pratique de l'histoire ? Analyse d'une question cruciale.
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
An exceptional Alaska lit mail day! I’m heading to #AWP26 (my first AWP!) later this week, and am very excited about my travel reading.
Copies of Joan Naviyuk Kane’s book With Snow Pouring South Past the Window and Corinna Cook’s Permafrost is an Archive: And other Inheritances from the Alaska-Yukon borderlands
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
Midway through the three feet of snow that came to Providence in the last 24 hours, overtaking the Blizzard of ‘78 record. My
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
The world is so very bad, but this week we hung in our house a tapestry my mother wove, my father made the wooden hanger for with salmon-shaped hardware my brother cast out of copper, based on a photo I made on the middle fork of the Koyukuk River. It feels like the confluence of many homes.
A photo of a tapestry of a gray and white river cutting through yellow and green shrubs with green and blue and deep maroon hills behind. The hanger is blonde and dark wood in the shape of mountains, with cast salmon securing the tapestry to the hanger.
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Patrik Gronostaj @electrification.bsky.social · 07/02/2026
"Industry, for the growing European middle classes, first meant freedom from want—from the real tyrannies of hunger and cold—and then freedom to want. Consumption itself became a kind of liberty." Beautifully about Svalbard and the world by @brdemuth.bsky.social hakaimagazine.com/features/foo...
hakaimagazine.com
Footprints of Extraction | Hakai Magazine
The Svalbard Archipelago was uninhabited until humans came searching for resources. A historian follows their tracks.
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Institute at Brown for Environment & Society (IBES) @brown-ibes.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
"Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait" by @brdemuth.bsky.social, Dean's Associate Professor at IBES and @brownhist.bsky.social, has been selected as the 2025-2026 Brown University Book Award 📕🏆 👏 Learn more: insite.browntextbook.com/BrownBookAward
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
I can endorse working with @greenleejw.bsky.social for maps if you’re looking! He helped with a whole series of custom maps for an edited volume on rivers coming out in about a year — all sorts of scales and details
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Dr Surekha Davies, Historical Monster Consultant (she/her) @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social · 30/12/2025
@brdemuth.bsky.social's essay in @grantamag.bsky.social on time spent in the Yukon piecing together oral histories of the Russian empire. Read it to the end; no spoilers! granta.com/where-the-la...
granta.com
Where the Language Changes
‘I am on the hunt for the Russian Empire, or what traces might still exist of its colonial enterprise.’ Bathsheba Demuth travels the Yukon river, following the history of the fur trade and the Nulato ...
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Avian (aka Julianne Warren) @coyotetrail.bsky.social · 29/12/2025
“I heard her say, ‘The love is there. The love is there. The love is there. Babe, the love is there. The love is there. The love is there.’” - Laureli Ivanoff
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Rick Thoman @alaskawx.bsky.social · 21/12/2025
Tanacross #Dene #Language #Alaska Saa Dzé’edeex Dé’ "Winter Solstice"; literary when the sun divides Wunenh Nach’ehjedh "December" Nach’imbâal Dzeen "Christmas"; refers to an old custom of giving/receiving gifts at the darkest time of year. Dzeen Chox "Christmas" post-gold rush term
Black and white clipart sketch showing a dog team crossing a river or late with a setting or rising sun on the horizon.
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 14/12/2025
I feel like this is the nightmare we all dread in the US — an active shooter in your community. Brown University is still in shelter in place 3 hours in, with 2 confirmed deaths, 8 in critical condition, and no shooter(s) in custody. One of my students had to run from the scene. Horrified.
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 13/12/2025
Thank you for all the suggestions in the replies! It’s really expanded this syllabus-in-progress
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Brown History Department @brownhist.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
"Rivers are messy: Beyond the water bias in research and management" — A new article co-authored by @brdemuth.bsky.social combines historical and natural science ways of thinking about rivers to argue for the importance of understanding them as more than simply channels of water.
journals.plos.org
Rivers are messy: Beyond the water bias in research and management
This article reviews current trends in interdisciplinary river research to argue that a “water bias” or tendency consider rivers as synonymous with water can hinder our understanding of rivers and con...
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
Favorite recent or classic readings on the history of environmental movements, 19th and 20th C? This is for a senior seminar, US and Europe as geographical focus #envhist
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
This pretty much sums up why I’m reviving the plan B’s I had in grad school. www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...
currentaffairs.org
AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
A lovely piece on the Greenlandic photographer Inuuteq Storch, who has such an eye for movement and light and what lies beneath surfaces www.newyorker.com/culture/phot...
newyorker.com
A Greenlandic Photographer’s Tender Portraits of Daily Life
Inuuteq Storch set out to rediscover Inuit culture that was suppressed by Danish colonizers, by finding its traces in the everyday.
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
A reminder of late summer from doing much overdue photo backups today. Caribou bull in west Denali National Park. Tundra about to turn, velvet about to shed.
A caribou bull stands in green tundra with spruce in the background. He has a white ruff and tail and substantial antlers.
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jayson m porter @roguechieftan.bsky.social · 08/11/2025
I'm opening up a Black & Indigenous environmental art gallery @umterps.bsky.social to help students navigate climate anxiety & other stresses that come with learning about environmental injustice & environmental racism. Please consider donating & coming to our fundraiser @framebridge.bsky.social!
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
Exactly a year ago, Ellen Wohl, @parriblue.bsky.social and I spent two days in Providence thinking about #rivers and how we conceptualize them & live with them. Here’s the result of history and fluvial geomorphology teaming up. #envhist doi.org/10.1371/jour...
doi.org
Rivers are messy: Beyond the water bias in research and management
This article reviews current trends in interdisciplinary river research to argue that a “water bias” or tendency consider rivers as synonymous with water can hinder our understanding of rivers and con...
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
Exactly a year ago, Ellen Wohl, @parriblue.bsky.social and I spent two days in Providence thinking about #rivers and how we conceptualize them & live with them. Here’s the result of history and fluvial geomorphology teaming up. #envhist doi.org/10.1371/jour...
doi.org
Rivers are messy: Beyond the water bias in research and management
This article reviews current trends in interdisciplinary river research to argue that a “water bias” or tendency consider rivers as synonymous with water can hinder our understanding of rivers and con...
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 03/11/2025
I’m so excited and honored for this upcoming talk & events at Oxford, some with an amazing lineup of other Arctic folks!
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Sarah Gilman @sarahmgilman.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
So far, the administration's Alaska agenda is still a lot of bluster and not a lot of action. Great reporting from @loisparshley.bsky.social for @grist.org
grist.org
Trump officials say Alaska is 'open for business.' So far, no one's buying.
The administration wants to drill in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Oil companies don’t, leaving Alaska to spend millions propping up the idea.
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
I’m so excited to talk about this great book with Joseph Lee tomorrow. If you’re in Providence, come by!
tomorrow.xn--youre-1v3b
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
In case you’re free in July and want to spend a week on the Yukon… freeflowinstitute.com/product/rive...
freeflowinstitute.com
RIVERS IN TIME, RIVERS IN WORDS - Freeflow Institute
An experiential deep dive into the history + evolving narrative of the Yukon
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 19/10/2025
Last week, western Alaska was hit by the powerful remnants of a typhoon. Recovery is just beginning for communities an airplane away building materials & other support. PBS has a good overview of this social-climate disaster. Ways to support linked below. m.youtube.com/watch?v=t5kz...
m.youtube.com
Rescue crews airlift hundreds out of rural Alaskan villages after powerful storm
YouTube video by PBS NewsHour
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 19/10/2025
“what happens if we also reconnect with the mule? What can mules teach us about the black history of land and violence in the United States?” A terrific piece of #envhist on mules, labor, and how “empire doesn’t always win” from @roguechieftan.bsky.social www.sciencehistory.org/stories/maga...
sciencehistory.org
Mule Power
Unpacking empires and diaspora in Mexico and the United States.
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Tao Leigh Goffe | 道 | PhD @taoleighgoffe.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
This year I wrote a book about how Columbus colonized the Caribbean in 1492 - not what is now the US mainland. My book DARK LABORATORY celebrates Kalinago survivance and the African agrarian x aquatic traditions people like my ancestors, who were enslaved, brought to the region.
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
I’m very lucky to work with Myles, and am so excited to hear him talk about his amazing new book in a few weeks!
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Eva Holland @evaholland.bsky.social · 10/09/2025
Something good: a new, nonprofit newsroom run by some wonderful, experienced folks (core crew from Outside mag's glory days) dedicated to journalism about American public lands! Looks like the plan is to collaborate a fair bit with other outlets.
republic.land
RE:PUBLIC
INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM FOR PUBLIC LANDS.
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