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Tom Hawkins

Tom Hawkins

Tom Hawkins

Associate Professor

hawkins.312@osu.edu

(614) 292-2744

414 E University Hall
230 N. Oval Mall
Columbus, OH 43210

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Areas of Expertise

  • Greek Literature
  • Black Classicisms
  • Reception Studies
  • Comedy and Satire

Education

  • A.B. Stanford 1994
  • B.S. Stanford 1994 (Environmental Engineering)
  • M.A. UC Santa Barbara 1997
  • Ph.D. Stanford 2003

My career draws inspiration both from George Orwell’s idea that ‘who controls the past controls the future’ and from the reinvigoration of that line as it is performed by Rage Against the Machine.

My early work examined how artistic performances of the past shape the future within the world of ancient Greco-Roman literature, through publications such as Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire (Cambridge 2014) and Athenian Comedy in the Roman Empire (co-edited with C. W. Marshall, Bloomsbury 2015). More recently I have devoted much of my energy to the field of Black Classicisms, as in Hacking Classical Forms in Haitian Literature (Routledge 2023), but this line of work also transcends scholarly publication. For example, I serve on the Advisory Board of Eos, which presents itself as ‘an act of resistance and a conduit for change’. In that spirit of change, I engage the public by organizing events such as performances of Rita Dove’s The Darker Face of the Earth (2018) and Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides (2020, both directed by Tom Dugdale), through my 2023 TedX talk, and by serving as the faculty mentor to Black Students in Classics, an affinity group that brings together Black Classics students at the high school and college levels. Through these activities, I hope to promote a deeper awareness of how the field of Classics can help us work toward solutions to the problems that face us today and those that loom on the horizon.

If my profile speaks to your own interests, I would love to hear from you.

 

Publications and Personal Webpage

 

Books

Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire     

Athenian Comedy in the Roman Empire
 
 

Professor Tom Hawkins' Full CV 

File
 
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