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), transmediality (Classical Philology, 2025) scatological language (Greece & Rome, 2023), and the poetics of food and eating (Mnemosyne, 2017).

As the A.G. Leventis Fellow in Greek Studies, I am pursuing a new project entitled ‘The Aesthetics of Fragmentation'. The project’s aim is to identify the aesthetic qualities which predispose a text to fragmentation, and to consider how a fragment’s incompleteness may offer aesthetic and hermeneutic possibilities to readers in both antiquity and modernity.

As part of this project, I've become particularly interested in Julius Pollux's Onomasticon, a 2nd century A.D. encyclopaedia/lexicon which is the source of large numbers of fragments from lost works of ancient Greek literature. An initial article on this topic entitled 'Sappho in Julius Pollux's Onomasticon: a Material Girl in a Material World' was recently published in Classical Quarterly. A monograph, provisionally entitled Reading Classical Literature Through Julius Pollux's Onomasticon: The Poetry of Things, is in progress and earmarked for publication with OUP.  

Some of my key publications are available below

Sappho in Julius Pollux's Onomasticon: a Material Girl in a Material World, Classical Quarterly 2025

'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