Title(s): Assistant Professor (Lecturer)
University: University of Utah
Website: jessehouf.org
Description of your work
My research explores discourse about bacteria, life processes, and particular orifices that open the human body to being more-than-human. The human microbiome is described as bringing forth a “new microbial age” that challenges prior understandings of health/disease, self/non-self, and commensal/pathogenic. Utilizing critical genealogy, my research seeks to understand how we arrived at this moment, and how we are discursively constituting the healthy human body with bacteria. Toward this end, I trace specific bacterial species (such as Clostridioides difficile) that are part of life processes and are enacted at specific bodily sites (such as the colon). I am currently working on a book project tentatively titled Bacteria, Bodies, and Boundaries: A Critical Genealogy of Clostridioides difficile and the Germ Theory of Subjectivity.