Naomi A. Weiss

Originally from Cambridge UK, Naomi Weiss arrived at Harvard in 2014 after receiving a BA and MSt from Oxford and a PhD in Classics from the University of California, Berkeley. Much of her research has focused on the performance and representation of music and dance in archaic and classical Greece, particularly in tragedy, on which she has published multiple articles. Her first book, The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater (University of California Press, 2018) takes a new approach to the study of the classical Greek theater by exploring the dramatic function of mousikē (song, music, dance) in the plays of Euripides. Her co-edited volume, Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models (Brill, 2019; edited with Margaret Foster and Leslie Kurke), foregrounds innovative approaches to the question of genre, what it means, and how to think about it for ancient Greek poetry and performance. She has also co-edited (with Lauren Curtis) Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2021), which explores music’s role in discourses of cultural memory, communication, and commemoration in ancient Greek and Roman societies. Her new book project, Seeing Theater in Classical Athens, examines how ancient Greek theater shapes its audiences as viewers -- how tragedy, comedy, and satyr play construct the phenomenological experience of their audiences, and how this experience is restaged and appropriated in other media.