Ericksen Lectureship: "The Microbial Imagination" by Dr. Kym Weed

About this event

Dr. Kym Weed will deliver the 2026 Ericksen Lecture, titled "The Microbial Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Science."

As the new science of bacteriology rendered visible a world vibrantly alive with microbial life, American writers and scientists turned to a diverse set of imaginative forms to represent and make sense of the outsized impact of microscopic life on human health. This lecture explores how writers and scientists alike grappled with the implications of microbial agency and human-microbe intimacies, developing diverse and often contradictory ways of imagining microbial life. Using Alice James’s diary as a case study, it will demonstrate how James’s microbial imagination domesticates the influenza bacillus as an ally rather than enemy. Focusing on the period before the consolidation of a dominant narrative of interspecies antagonism that casts microbes primarily as enemies to be contained or eradicated, this talk suggests that nineteenth-century microbial imaginaries offer alternative ways of thinking about contemporary environmental and public health crises.