Victoria Lee
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Victoria Lee is a science historian with a focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and an associate professor of history at Ohio University. Her research concentrates on a comparative historical exploration of the problem of microbial control for achieving sustainable growth. Her book, The Arts of the Microbial World (University of Chicago Press, 2021; awarded the International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize for the Best Book in the Humanities, 2023), examined fermentation science in twentieth-century Japan, 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. Her current work considers how twentieth-century microbial history offers insights into twenty-first century questions in light of the growing appreciation of microbes’ role in sustaining organisms at every level of life through the microbiome, mediating climate change (especially in agriculture), and contributing to innovations in green chemistry. She has held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the Science History Institute, and her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Mediapart.
Victoria Lee joins the Paris IAS in June 2026 for a one-month writing residency.
Research topics
History of Science and Technology; History of Microbiology and Biotechnology; History of Chemistry; Environmental History; Agricultural History.
Our Microbial Lives: A Manifesto Against Eradication
The need for conservation of microbial diversity is underlined by growing recognition of the importance of microbes to human activities (or potential activities) in agriculture, bioremediation, and geoengineering. Yet, microbes are different from other targets of conservation, such as butterflies and elephants: We feel differently about them. This project develops a theory of charismatic microbes as a historical phenomenon, exploring cases from efforts toward global eradication of microbial pathogens such as smallpox in the 1970s to the foregrounding of microbes as the “life support system of the biosphere” in climate studies and policy after the 2000s, and suggests possible ways of mobilizing their appeal to help enable conservation efforts. It documents the broad shift in the nature of microbial charisma, focusing on agroindustrial biotechnology, as techniques in environmental microbiology expanded the scope of microbial ecology and the discovery of the microbiome heightened motivation to preserve microbes to deepen knowledge of human culture in the 1990s and post-2000s era. It reevaluates the modern repertoire of human relationships with microbes in light of philosophers’ and social scientists’ calls to foster a greater sense of kinship with nonhuman organisms toward a more sustainable future. The research project results in a position paper outlining some alternatives to approaches dominated by the goal of absolute control or eradication, in line with the gradual discovery that we live inherently microbial lives.
Key publications
Victoria Lee. “Food Machinery”. In The Cambridge History of Technology, vol. 2, edited by Dagmar Schäfer, Francesca Bray, Tiago Saraiva, Shadreck Chirikure, and Matteo Valleriani. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
Victoria Lee. The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan. University of Chicago Press, 2021.
Victoria Lee. “Wild Toxicity, Cultivated Safety: Aflatoxin and Kōji Classification as Knowledge Infrastructure”. History and Technology 35, 405-424, 2019.
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