Biography

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. She 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.

Many of Weiss's earlier publications have 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), explores the dramatic function of mousikē (song, music, dance) in the plays of Euripides. She has also co-edited (with Lauren Curtis) Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which examines music’s role in discourses of cultural memory, communication, and commemoration in ancient Greek and Roman societies.

Issues of genre often inform and motivate Weiss's work. These include ideas about the origins of song types in the ancient Greek musico-poetic imaginary and in the classical scholarly tradition; generic self-consciousness and generic hybridity in archaic and classical Greek poetry; and also genre in terms of her own scholarly practice, as she brings together forms of drama (tragedy, comedy, satyr play) and media (plays, pots) that are rarely analyzed side by side. 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. 

Weiss's 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. Analyzing the construction of space, props, and bodies across different genres and media through the lens of theater phenomenology, Weiss shows how they exploit the potential fissures, tensions, and misalignments between the means and objects of representation. Seeing Theater was awarded the 2024 Goodwin Award of Merit from the Society for Classical Studies.

With Sarah Olsen (Williams College), Weiss has begun work on a new commentary on Euripides' Orestes for Cambridge University Press. She is also starting to write a short monograph entitled Tragic Repetition, which draws from the model of intertheatricality in Theater Studies to explore Euripides' experimentation with tragedy's repetitive cycles. With Margaret Foster (University of Michigan), Weiss is editing a volume entitled Cultural Poetics in Ancient Greece: New Directions. With Anna Uhlig (UC Santa Cruz), she is series editor of Cambridge Elements in Greek and Roman Drama and Performance. Other forthcoming work includes articles on, respectively, the use of tragedy in Aristotle's History of the Animals, the representation of women as pottery in Aristophanic comedy, and the role of graffiti in Lucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans.

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.