Naomi Weiss
Naomi Weiss is Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies and Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. Weiss is primarily a scholar of archaic and classical Greek literature and culture. Her research spans several intersecting areas for the ancient Greek world: drama, especially tragedy; music and chorality; questions of genre; and the relationship between poetry and pottery. Central to much of her work is the relation between language, performance, and audience.
Her first book, The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater (University of California Press, 2018), explores the dramatic function of mousikē (song, music, dance) in the plays of Euripides. Her most recent book, Seeing Theater: The Phenomenology of Classical Greek Drama (University of California Press, 2023), is about how fifth-century drama (tragedy, comedy, satyr play) interrogates the spectator's own viewing experience; it was awarded the 2024 Goodwin Award of Merit from the Society for Classical Studies. She has co-edited Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models (with Margaret Foster and Leslie Kurke; Brill, 2019) and Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds (with Lauren Curtis; Cambridge University Press, 2021). With Anna Uhlig (University of California, Santa Cruz), she is series editor of Cambridge Elements in Greek and Roman Drama and Performance.
With Sarah Olsen (Williams College), Weiss is writing a new commentary on Euripides' Orestes for Cambridge University Press. She is also writing a short monograph entitled Tragic Repetition, which draws from the model of intertheatricality in Theater Studies to explore how Euripides experimented with tragedy's repetitive cycles. With Margaret Foster (University of Michigan), she is editing a volume entitled Texts, Objects, Politics, and Praise: Revisiting Ancient Greek Cultural Poetics in Dialogue with Leslie Kurke. Weiss is also the host of Ancient Greece Today, a podcast that brings together scholars and artists to explore the ancient Greek world and how it is used and reimagined in the present day.
Originally from Cambridge, UK, Weiss arrived at Harvard in 2014 after receiving a BA and an MSt from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Classics from the University of California, Berkeley.