Dr Naomi Scott

My research to date has focused primarily on Old Comedy, with a particular emphasis on the fragmentary corpus. My monograph Jokes in Greek Comedy: From Puns to Poetics (Bloomsbury 2023) is the first study of jokes as a site of literary and philosophical enquiry in Greek Comedy, and argues that jokes and poetry share key formal and philosophical structures: Both are modes of utterance which specifically set out to flout the rules of ordinary speech; neither are straightforwardly communicative; and both in different ways privilege form over content. As a whole, the book asserts the centrality of jokes and puns to Old Comedy’s engagement with the language and convention of poetic representation

In addition to my monograph, I’ve published on a wide variety of topics including on comic and tragic stagecraft (Phoenix 2019), metaphor theory (Arethusa 2019), scatological language (Greece & Rome, 2023), and the poetics of food and eating (Mnemosyne, 2017).

As the A.G. Leventis Fellow in Greek Studies, I will be pursuing a new project entitled ‘The Aesthetics of Fragmentation in Ancient Encyclopaedias’. I’m interested in how the aesthetic and epistemic priorities of encyclopaediasts shaped their acquisition, compilation, and transmission of fragmentary texts, and how this has shaped not only our fragmentary corpus, but our picture of Classical antiquity. I’ll be focusing primarily on the Onomasticon of Julius Pollux, and working towards producing a digital, crowd-sourced translation of Pollux’s work.

Some of my key publications are available below

'Jokes in Greek Comedy: From Puns to Poetics', Bloomsbury, 2023

'"Don't Let Me Become A Comic Shitpot!": Gender in Aristophanes' Assemblywomen', Greece and Rome 70(2), 2023

'Metaphors and Jokes in the Fragments of Cratinus', Arethusa 52(3), 2019

'Flying too Close to the Sun: Dramatic Illusion and Theatrical Failure in Aristophanes' Peace', Phoenix 73(1-2), 2019