Victoria Lee: Microbes & Sustainability/Fermentation in 20th Century East Asia

Join CoSS Sustainability Interdisciplinary Research Theme in welcoming Victoria Lee as she discusses her work, The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan. 

When: Tuesday November 21st, 3-4pm

Where: St. Andrew's Building room 227

New developments in biology, agriculture, and industry in recent decades suggest that the traditional eradication-based approach to the microbial world is unsustainable, including in the fields of the microbiome, climate change, and green chemistry. The Arts of the Microbial World looks at fermentation science in twentieth-century Japan, in a society where microbes were distinctively known and used as living workers as much as pathogens, as a direct precedent to the more recent recognition of microbial ecologies as an inseparable part of human society in Europe and America.

About our speaker:

Victoria Lee is an associate professor of history at Ohio University, USA. Her book The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan (Chicago 2021) won the 2023 International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize for the Best Book in the Humanities. She has been a fellow at the Institut d'études avancées de Paris and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her writings have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, NPR’s flagship programme All Things Considered, and Mediapart (France). A native of Toronto, Canada, she received her BA from Cambridge, her MSc from Imperial College London, and her PhD from Princeton University.