2026 Harrington Lecture: Dr. Bathsheba Demuth
- When
- Thursday, November 5, 20265:30 PM – 7:00 PM ESTAdd to calendarGoogle Calendar
- Where
- Purnell Hall 118Purnell Hall, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USAOpen in Maps
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About
The History Department Presents
The 2026 Harrington Lecture
Dr. Bathsheba Demuth, Brown University
Dean's Associate Professor of History & Environment and Society
"Salmon Heads and Beaver Laws: On the Intersections of Environmental History and Legal Practice"
Flowing from northwestern Canada and across Alaska, the Yukon River watershed connects human and ecological communities from the ocean to North America's highest mountains. Drawing on archival research, fieldwork, Indigenous, imperial, and nation-state legal traditions made law with, for, and about the Yukon River over the past two centuries - from seeing law in the actions of salmon to using laws to shape human relations with beavers. In doing do, it offers an argument for how environmental history can widen the scope of the social in ways critical to our understanding of what law is, and who it is for, in an era of climate change and species loss.
Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian focused on the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. In addition to her prize-winning book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, she writes for a range of audiences in publications from The American Historical Review to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, Emergence, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Demuth is currently writing a biography of the Yukon River watershed.