Caroline A. Brown, Associate Professor of English, is an alumna of Vassar College (BA) and Stanford University (MA/PhD). She specializes in 20th-century US literature and culture, women's studies, and the literature of the African Diaspora. Professor Brown is the author of The Black Female Body in American Literature and Art: Performing Identity (Routledge, 2012), which examines how African-American writers and visual artists interweave icon and inscription in order to (re)envision the black female body, traditionally rendered alien and inarticulate within Western discursive and visual systems. Analyzing how the works of contemporary African-American women novelists intersect with those of postmodern visual artists, The Black Female Body maps how black aesthetic and performative practices reimagine American citizenship and national belonging.

Professor Brown is currently at work on two projects. Dark Eros: Madness, Mayhem, and Cultural Mourning in Women's Novels of the Black Diaspora is a book-length project analyzing black women's experimental writing strategies as the crossroads where aesthetic praxis morphs into political engagement. Barack Obama: A Cultural Study explores Barack Obama as the template on which she graphs the intersections of race, demographic shift, and presidential politics. In doing so, she interrogates both the influence of popular culture on political transformation and the impact, in turn, of politics on cultural production.

Heather Meek's work explores the intersections of literary and medical cultures in the long eighteenth century, with a particular focus on texts authored by women and physicians. Her publications include investigations of Frances Burney’s early nineteenth-century mastectomy narrative (in Literature and Medicine, 2017); Samuel Richardson’s relationship to the medical milieu of his time (in Samuel Richardson in Context, Cambridge UP, 2017); medical discourse and the origins of the novel (in Literature and Medicine: The Eighteenth Century, Cambridge UP, 2021); eighteenth-century vocabularies of illness (in BMJ: Medical Humanities, 2022); and representations of blood and bloodletting (in Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2023). Her monograph, Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain (McGill-Queen’s University Press), appeared in November 2023. With Heike Härting, she is currently completing an edited collection, Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics (Routledge), that will appear in March 2024.