BIO
Maya Hey is an interdisciplinary researcher focusing on the ways that we live with and understand microbes like bacteria, moulds, and yeasts. She’s the author of the book Singing with Invisible Worlds: Fermenting Sake on Microbial Time, forthcoming with the University of Minnesota Press. She is currently based in Stockholm, at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, as the recipient of a Formas grant for early career scholars with a new project on microbial time at the Environmental Humanities Laboratory.
She was formerly 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.
Her research brings together disciplines such as science and technology studies, 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 response-ability in a highly microbial world.
Her work experience spans preschools, chemistry labs, culinary kitchens, organic farms, food banks, and retail markets, where she has cumulatively garnered over 15 years of experience facilitating discussions around contemporary food and health issues. She leads the group fff|food feminism fermentation and is passionate about open education and pedagogy.
She tweets @heymayahey and shares images @heymayahey as well. You can find her CV and list of publications at the bottom of the Portfolio page.
Previous research, ACADEMIC BACKGROUND & TEACHING APPOINTMENTS
Ph.D. Communication Studies
M.A. Food Culture and Communications
B.S. Dietetics and Food Administration
ORCiD record
YH research portal
ResearchGate
Maya Hey completed her PhD at Concordia University (Communication Studies, with distinction) in 2021 as a Vanier scholar, with research funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Government of Canada). Her doctoral research examined fermentation as a way to theorise communications in human–microbe relationships, based on a sensory ethnography conducted in Japan. While at Concordia, she was also a recipient of the Public Scholars Award (2019) from the School of Graduate Studies and served as a former Fellow of the Faculty of Arts and Science. Prior, she completed her master’s degree in Food Culture and Communication at the Università degli Studi di Scienze Gastronomiche (Pollenzo, Italy) and earned a Bachelor of Science in Nutrition, Dietetics, and Food Administration with an emphasis in chemistry.
Previous 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).
Her departmental appointments have ranged in discipline from media studies to rhetoric to sociology, with teaching experience in critical thinking, articulation theory, special topics in food/media, and hands-on workshops. At Colorado State University (2021-2022), she taught courses on composition and rhetoric to undergraduate science majors. She also developed a pilot course as part of an innovative first-year curriculum sponsored by the Teagle Foundation.
Maya Hey 