Julia Nelson Hawkins

Julia is an assistant professor at Ohio State University. Her areas of interest include Latin poetry, ancient medicine and Hellenistic culture in Rome. She is currently preparing a monograph on medical imagery in Augustan poetry, titled The Poetics of Medicine in Augustan Rome: Therapoetics after Actium. She examines why there are so many prominent scenes of plague and, more generally, disease and healing in the long, narrative poems of the Augustan period after Actium and, in particular, why the final books of the Georgics, Aeneid, and Metamorphoses all deal with significant medical themes. She sees the proliferation of medical imagery in such poetry of this period as more than just a nod to Lucretius and Thucydides, who both helped to establish the plague narrative as a literary topos. She takes a more socio-political approach and argues that these images are connected to broader shifts in medicine and its increasing association with politics in the late Republic and, in particular, to Augustus' creation of a "healing persona" after the Civil Wars.