Heather Meek
- Professeure agrégée
-
Faculté des arts et des sciences - Département de littératures et de langues du monde
Pavillon Lionel-Groulx office C8118
Web : Page professionnelle (faculté,département,école)
Web : Site web de l’unité de recherche
Web : Bibliographie
Affiliations
- Membre – RéQEF — Réseau québécois en études féministes
- Membre – CELCP — Centre de recherche des études littéraires et culturelles sur la planétarité
Education Programs
- Literature and Languages
- Literature and Languages
- Literature and Languages
- Literature and Languages
- Literature and Languages
- Literature and Languages
- Literature and Languages
- Literature and Languages Humanities
Courses
- ANG1002 Reading Fiction
- ANG1103 Composition: Critical Writing
- ANG2153 British Literature 1790 to 1900
- ANG6130 18th-Century British Literature
- ANG68951 Séminaire en études anglaises 1.1
- ANG6896 Séminaire en études anglaises 2
Areas of Expertise
- 18th Century Literature
- Women's Writing
- History of medicine
- Literature and Medicine
- Women's Studies
- Gender studies
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.
Student supervision Expand all Collapse all
“[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
Thèses et mémoires dirigés
/
2023
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2023
Race, mimicry, ambivalence, and third space in The woman of colour : a tale (1808)
Thèses et mémoires dirigés
/
2022
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2022
The "Effect of Education" on kinship ties in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park
Thèses et mémoires dirigés
/
2021
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2021
Why Say No? : Marriage Proposal Rejections in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
Thèses et mémoires dirigés
/
2020
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2020
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"
Thèses et mémoires dirigés
/
2019
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2019
Women’s Food Refusal and Feminine Appetites in the long British Eighteenth Century
Thèses et mémoires dirigés
/
2018
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2018
Research projects Expand all Collapse all
Les études culturelles et littéraires sur La planétarité: Pratiques, épistémologies, et pédagogies transformatrices Projet de recherche au Canada / 2020 - 2025
Lead researcher :
Heike Harting
Co-researchers :
Simon Harel
,
Heather Meek
,
Catherine Mavrikakis
,
Yves-Marie Abraham
,
Karoline Truchon
,
Domenico Beneventi
,
Catherine Leclerc
,
Monica Popescu
,
Yasmin Jiwani
,
Isaac Bazié
,
Raphael Canet
Funding sources:
FRQSC/Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FQRSC)
Grant programs:
PVXXXXXX-(SE) Programme Soutien aux équipes de recherche - Stade de développement : Nouvelle équipe
Re-Imagining Illness: The British Woman Writer's Medical Knowledge, 1660-1820 Projet de recherche au Canada / 2019 - 2024
Lead researcher :
Heather Meek
Funding sources:
CRSH/Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada
Grant programs:
PVXXXXXX-Subvention Savoir
Petticoat Doctors and their Pens: The Medical Knowledge of Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Projet de recherche au Canada / 2018 - 2021
Lead researcher :
Heather Meek
Funding sources:
CRSH/Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada
Grant programs:
PVX20020-Subvention institutionnelle du CRSH - Subventions d'exploration
L'HYSTERIE, LA MATERNITE ET LA PROFESSION DE FEMME DE LETTRES EN GRANDE-BRETAGNE AU DIX-HUITIEME SIECLE Projet de recherche au Canada / 2014 - 2018
Lead researcher :
Heather Meek
Funding sources:
FRQSC/Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FQRSC)
Grant programs:
PV113813-(NP) Soutien à la recherche pour la relève professorale
Publications Expand all Collapse all
Publications principales
- “‘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
- “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.
- “Medicine and Health.” Samuel Richardson in Context. Ed. Peter Sabor and Betty Schellenberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 264-71.
- “‘[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.
- “Frances Burney’s Mastectomy Narrative and Discourses of Breast Cancer in the Long Eighteenth Century.” Literature and Medicine 35.1 (Spring 2017): 27-45.
- “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.
- “An ‘imperfect’ Model of Authorship in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal.” Authorship 4.2 (Fall 2015): 1-13.
- “Medical Men, Women of Letters, and Treatments for Eighteenth-Century Hysteria.” Journal of Medical Humanities 34.1 (March 2013): 1-14.
- “‘[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.
- “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.
- “Medical Women and Hysterical Doctors: Interpreting Hysteria’s Symptoms.” The English Malady: Enabling and Disabling Fictions. Ed. Glen Colburn. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008. 223-47.
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