Projects

• Community Commons

• Falls Narrative Study

  (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

biography

Kym Weed is a Senior Lecturer and the Assistant Director of Graduate Studies at Vanderbilt University's Center for Medicine, Health, and Society where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in health humanities. She holds a PhD in English & Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as well as an MA in English from the University of Maryland, College Park and a BS in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology from Lebanon Valley College. As the founding Assistant Director of the HHIVE Lab <http://hhive.web.unc.edu/>, Kym coordinated the Falls Narrative Study, which examines how older adults talk and write about falls when paired with a team of UNC students. Her book manuscript, "Our Microbes: Imagining Human Interdependence with Bacteria in American Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880-1920," examines the role that "friendly" microbes played in the American imagination post germ theory. Rather than continue literary scholarship that focuses solely on the anxieties and fears provoked by disease-causing germs, the project attends to the bacteriologists, industry leaders, domestic workers, and fiction writers who located utility and possibility in the microbial world.

research interests