Heather Meek’s teaching and research interests include eighteenth-century women’s writing, mental illness, maternity, and the intersections of literature and medicine. Her most recent articles, “‘[W]hat fatigues we fine ladies are fated to endure’: Sociosomatic Hysteria as a Female ‘English Malady’” and  “Medical Men, Women of Letters, and Treatments for Eighteenth-Century Hysteria,” are forthcoming in Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period (Brepols, 2011) and Journal of Medical Humanities, respectively. She has essays in The English Malady: Enabling and Disabling Fictions (Cambridge Scholars, 2008), The European Spectator, and English Studies in Canada; these essays look at eighteenth-century hysteria as an elusive cultural condition, as an intellectual affliction, and as a vehicle for feminist thought. She is currently exploring eighteenth-century diarist Hester Lynch Piozzi’s response to medical understandings of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood.