Headshot of Professor Nancy Worman

Nancy Worman

Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature

Department

Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Classics and Ancient Studies, Comparative Literature

Contact

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Nancy Worman joined the faculty of Barnard in 1996, having received her BA from Barnard and PhD from Princeton. Professor Worman is affiliated with the Program in Comparative Literature and the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She teaches courses in Classics and Comparative Literature such as Tragic Bodies, Ancient Literary Criticism, and Feminist Receptions, as well as Greek language courses.

Professor Worman's research focuses on style and the body in performance in classical Greek drama and its reception, as well as rhetoric and ancient and modern literary theory and criticism. She has published books and articles on these topics, including Landscape and the Spaces of Metaphor in Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism (Cambridge 2015), Virginia Woolf’s Greek Tragedy (Bloomsbury 2019), and Tragic Bodies: Edges of the Human in Greek Drama (Bloomsbury 2021), which won the 2022 PROSE Award for Classics. Her current research is focused on embodiment in ancient and modern literary theory and feminist receptions of ancient literature.

  • BA, Barnard College
  • MA, PhD, Princeton University

  • Performance and the body
  • Ancient and modern literary theory and criticism
  • Greek drama and oratory
  • Modernist and feminist receptions

Tragic Bodies: Edges of the Human in Greek Drama. Bloomsbury Press (2021).

Virginia Woolf's Greek Tragedy. Inaugural publication for the series Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing, ed. L. Jansen. Bloomsbury Press (2019).

Landscape and the Spaces of Metaphor in Ancient Literary Theory and CriticismCambridge University Press (2015).

"Euripidean Assemblages." In Ramus special volume (49.1-2): Deterritorializing Classics: Deleuze, Guattari and Antiquity (Bloomsbury. 2021), 1-17.

"Body Politics in Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric." In The Politics of Form, ed. Phiroze Vasunia (Bloomsbury, 2021), 145-60.

"Euripides and the Aesthetics of Embodiment." In The Brill Companion to Euripides, ed. A. Markantonatos (Brill, 2020), 748-72.

"Assemblages and Objects in Greek Tragedy." In Undoing the Human: Classical Literature and the Post-Human, ed. Giulia Maria Chesi and Francesca Spiegel (Bloomsbury, 2019), 247-57.

"Electra, Orestes, and The Sibling Hand." In The Materialities of Greek Tragedyed. M. Mueller and M. Telò (Bloomsbury, 2018), 185-201.

"Embodied Character and Dramatic Mimesis in Aeschines and Demosthenes." In Characterization in Ancient Greek Literature, ed. E. van Emdt Boaz and K. de Temmerman (Brill, 2017).

"Touching, Proximity, and the Aesthetics of Pain in Sophocles." In Touch and the Ancient Senses, ed. A. Purves (Routledge, 2017), 34-49.

"Euripides, Aristophanes, and the Reception of 'Sophistic' Styles." In The Blackwell Companion to Euripides, ed. L. McClure (Blackwell, 2017), 517-32.

"What Is 'Greek Sex' For?" In Ancient Sex: New Essays, ed. R. Blondell and K. Ormand (Ohio State University Press, 2015), 208-30.

"The Aesthetics of Ancient Landscapes." In A Companion to Ancient AestheticsBlackwell Companions to the Ancient World, ed. P. Destrée and P. Murray (Blackwell, 2015), 291-306.

"Mapping Literary Judgment in Aristophanes' Frogs." In Place, Space, and Landscape in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture, ed. K. Gilhuly and N. Worman (Cambridge, 2014), 200-39.