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 mousikē (music, song, 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 in the plays of Euripides. She is currently co-editing two volumes: The Genres of Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models (with Margaret Foster and Leslie Kurke) and Music and Memory in the Ancient Mediterranean (with Lauren Curtis). Her new book project, Seeing Theater: Staging and Spectacle in Classical Athens, aims to explore 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.