Heather Meek
- Professeure agrégée
-
Faculté des arts et des sciences - Département de littératures et de langues du monde
Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, room C8118
Profile
Research expertise
Heather Meek’s research interests include women’s writing, medical treatises, and the intersections of literature and medicine. Much of her published work looks at the subject of eighteenth-century hysteria by examining contemporaneous medical texts and first-hand accounts by women writers who themselves suffered from the condition. She has written on the ways that hysteria is at once a veritable illness, an elusive cultural condition, an intellectual affliction, and a vehicle for feminist thought. Her current project, funded by a SSHRC Insight grant (2019-2023), explores the medical knowledge of a group of eighteenth-century women writers and considers medical and literary understandings of conditions ranging from melancholy, hysteria, and madness; to chlorosis, pregnancy, and childhood illness; to smallpox, consumption, and breast cancer.
Affiliations and responsabilities
Research affiliations
Research units
Membre
Teaching and supervision
Teaching
Courses taught (current session only)
- ANG-1002 – Reading Fiction
- ANG-1103 – Composition: Critical Writing
- ANG-2454 – Literature and Medicine
- ANG-6130 – 18th-Century British Literature
Programs
- 113510 – Baccalauréat en études anglaises
- 113520 – Majeure en études anglaises
- 113540 – Mineure en études anglaises
- 113710 – Baccalauréat en littératures de langues anglaise et française
- 114010 – Baccalauréat en littérature comparée
- 213510 – Maîtrise en études anglaises
- 313510 – Doctorat en études anglaises
- 313710 – Doctorat en études allemandes
Student supervision
Theses and dissertation supervision (Papyrus Institutional Repository)
“[O]ur virtues and our vices depend too much on our circumstances” : prostitution as power in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a woman of pleasure
Cycle : Master's
Grade : M.A.
Race, mimicry, ambivalence, and third space in The woman of colour : a tale (1808)
Cycle : Master's
Grade : M. Sc.
The "Effect of Education" on kinship ties in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park
Cycle : Master's
Grade : M.A.
Why Say No? : Marriage Proposal Rejections in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
Cycle : Master's
Grade : M.A.
The Effect of Collective Psychology on the Mistreatment of Nineteenth-Century Women in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"
Cycle : Master's
Grade : M.A.
Women’s Food Refusal and Feminine Appetites in the long British Eighteenth Century
Cycle : Doctoral
Grade : Ph. D.
Projects
Research projects
Les études culturelles et littéraires sur La planétarité: Pratiques, épistémologies, et pédagogies transformatrices
Re-Imagining Illness: The British Woman Writer's Medical Knowledge, 1660-1820
Petticoat Doctors and their Pens: The Medical Knowledge of Eighteenth-Century Women Writers
L'HYSTERIE, LA MATERNITE ET LA PROFESSION DE FEMME DE LETTRES EN GRANDE-BRETAGNE AU DIX-HUITIEME SIECLE
Outreach
Publications and presentations
Publications
Livres
- Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Montreal; Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023.
- Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics (co-edited with Heike Härting). New York: Routledge, 2024 (forthcoming).
Articles de revue
- “‘Meanders of [the] Purple Flood’: Blood and Bloodletting in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Medicine.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (JECS) 46.1 (2023): 41-57. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12872
- “A ‘prodigious latitude’ of Words: Vocabularies of Illness in 18th-Century Medical Treatises and Women’s Writing.” BMJ: Medical Humanities 48.2 (2022): 253-60. doi: 10.1136/medhum-2020-012133
- “Frances Burney’s Mastectomy Narrative and Discourses of Breast Cancer in the Long Eighteenth Century.” Literature and Medicine 35.1 (Spring 2017): 27-45. doi: 10.1353/lm.2017.0001
- “Medical Men, Women of Letters, and Treatments for Eighteenth-Century Hysteria.” Journal of Medical Humanities 34.1 (March 2013): 1-14.
- “Creative Hysteria and the Intellectual Woman of Feeling.” Figures et culture de la dépression (1660-1800)/The Representation and Culture of Depression (1660-1800). Vol. 1. Spec. issue of Le Spectateur européen/The European Spectator: 10 (2010): 87-98.
- “Of Wandering Wombs and Wrongs of Women: Evolving Conceptions of Hysteria in the Age of Reason.” English Studies in Canada 35.2-3 (June/September 2009): 105-28.
Chapitres de livres
- “Jane Barker, Medical Discourse, and the Rise of the Novel.” Literature and Medicine: The Eighteenth Century. Volume 1. Ed. Clark Lawlor and Andrew Mangham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 51-69. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108355476.004
- “Medicine and Health.” Samuel Richardson in Context. Ed. Peter Sabor and Betty Schellenberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 264-71. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316576755.032
- “‘[F]ictitious [D]istress’ or Veritable Woe?: The Problem of Eighteenth-Century Ennui.” Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Fashioning the Unfashionable. Ed. Allan Ingram and Leigh Wetherall-Dickson. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017. 13-31. doi: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59718-2_2
- “Motherhood, Hysteria, and the Eighteenth-Century Woman Writer.” The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century. Ed. Raymond Stephanson and Darren Wagner. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. 238-57.
- “‘[W]hat fatigues we fine ladies are fated to endure’: Sociosomatic Hysteria as a Female ‘English Malady.’” Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period. Ed. Yasmin Haskell. Early European Research 1200-1650 Series. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishing, 2011. 375-96.
Disciplines
- Women Studies
- Literary Studies
- Literature
- History
Areas of expertise
- 18th Century Literature
- Women's Writing
- History of medicine
- Literature and Medicine
- Women's Studies
- Gender studies