Dawn LaValle Norman

Dawn LaValle Norman is a Research Fellow at Australian Catholic University’s Institute of Religion and Critical Inquiry. She completed her Ph.D. in 2015 at Princeton under Constanze Güthenke, and then spent two years at Oxford as a Junior Research Fellow at Magdalen College. Her first book, The Aesthetics of Hope in Late Greek Imperial Literature: Methodius of Olympus and the Crisis of the Third Century was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. Using one creative third-century author of philosophical dialogues, the book argues that some early Christians were pushing to reorient the imagination of a generation away from the “nostalgic” concerns of the Second Sophistic onto a glorious future yet to come. Her next project analyses the changing role that women play in philosophical dialogues from Plato to Augustine, arguing that tracking their roles simultaneously allows you to track the rise and fall of certain concepts labelled as “feminine”. She also maintains a lively interest in ancient and late-ancient medicine, especially their metaphorical uses.