Becca Hamilton

This project examines how nineteenth-century Americans encountered microbial life before germ theory's self/non-self doctrine reshaped biological understanding. Reading small forms – pamphlets, marginalia, ephemera – alongside canonical literary texts, the project recovers writers who intuited symbiotic relationships that immunology later erased. A central methodological innovation pairs archival work with laboratory cultivation of bacterial lives: attending to microbial rhythms, growth patterns, and sensory signatures develops the kind of pre-reflective bodily knowledge that makes nineteenth-century descriptions of fermentation and contagion newly legible. The project culminates in a public exhibition translating live bacterial activity into sound and image through biosonification technology, extending its methodology beyond the academy. At its core, the dissertation argues that pre-germ theory writers developed models of kinship and mutual constitution with microbial life—models displaced, but not destroyed, by Pasteurian bacteriology.