Arlo Fosburg

Arlo Fosburg is a postdoctoral scholar with the University Ecologies Initiative. Prior to this appointment, Arlo was a Ph.D. candidate in the Feminist Studies department with the Humanities Institute, with a designated emphasis in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and was a 2025–26 THI Summer Dissertation Fellow. They also represented UC Santa Cruz as one of two UC Network Fellows, selected for submitting a top-ranked proposal to The Humanities Institute. Arlo’s dissertation, “University Discipline: Scientific Agriculture, Militarism, and the Land-Grant College System,” challenges commonsense narratives of the university as an a priori good through a historical analysis of the land-grant college system—showing how efforts to broaden access to higher education for poor white farmers precipitated the mass dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands. Over the summer, Arlo conducted secondary site visits and archival research at five different universities. We recently caught up with them about their time in the field.