Maya Eva Hey

Maya Hey is an inter- and trans-disciplinary researcher focusing on the ways that we live with and understand microbes like bacteria, moulds, and yeasts. As a key theorist of fermentation, she’s the author of the bookSinging with Invisible Worlds: Fermenting Sake on Microbial Time, forthcoming with the University of Minnesota Press. She joins the Environmental Humanities Lab (EHL) with a Formas grant for early career scholars with a new project on microbes, temporality, and biotechnological innovation.

Her research approach brings together disciplines such as science and technology studies (STS), environmental humanities, and the social studies of microbes, with commitments to new materialism, practice-based methodologies, feminist/queer theory, and posthuman/more-than-human sensibilities. She is particularly interested in multiple ways of knowing microbes (through senses, through labs) and who can lay claim to microbial know-how. Across collaborative projects, she brings a humanities and social science perspective to the life sciences, calling upon intersectional, non-Western, and multispecies approaches to map out human responseibility in a highly microbial world. 

More generally, her interests span food politics in the built envrionment, more-than-human architectures, and planetary health. She is eager to collaborate with researchers locally and internationally.

Before KTH, she was a postdoctoral researcher with the Centre for the Social Study of Microbes at the University of Helsinki (2023-2026) and was a Vanier scholar with the government of Canada (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, 2018-2021). She holds degrees in nutrition, food studies, and communication studies; and, her teaching appointments have ranged in discipline from media studies to rhetoric to sociology. Since 2017, she has been developing new courses (as course responsible) and adapting existing ones, with pedagogical experiences in critical thinking, writing composition, and hands-on workshops. Recent course titles taught at other institutions include:

• Feminist Science and Technology Studies - course responsible
• Sociology of Food and Planetary Health - course responsible
• Writing in the Sciences (composition for science majors) - course responsible
• More-than-human Anthropology - guest lecturer
• Thinking through Materialities in Gender Studies and Science Studies - guest lecturer

Student supervision. Prospective Master's and PhD students in any of Dr. Hey's research interests are especially welcome to get in touch. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• human-nonhuman interactions, especially with microbes, insects, and flora;
• embodied knowledge and alternative epistemologies;
• political ecologies and political economies;
• planetary health and gut health;
• technological innovations;
• time and temporality;
• multispecies, sensory, and multi-modal ethnographies;
• practice-based research and research-creation

Please send expressions of interest to mayahey [at] kth.se directly.

Previous projects.  Prior to KTH, her research topics include synthetic biotechnologies and responsible innovation (2021-2022, Future Organisms), intersectionality in the Canadian context (2018-2019, Intersectionality Hub), research-creation and practice-based methods (2017-2018, Hexagram), enzymatic potential of koji (2016, Nordic Food Lab), ractopamine in the water supply (2014, Mezyk Lab), and discourses of food safety in post-Fukushima Japan (2013).

Publications.  Maya Hey has published single- and co-authored research articles in journals including:  Engaging Science, Technology, and Society;Sociology of Health and Illness; Humanities and Social Science Communications; Food, Culture & Society; Journal of Critical Dietetics; Feminist Philosophy Quarterly; among others. She has also written articles in popular magazines such as in Mold Magazine, FOOL Magazine, and Nya Nya Norrland. A full list of publications, including archived talks and emerging ideas, can be found on her personal website: www.heymayahey.com