Sarah Nooter

Professor Nooter writes about Greek drama and modern reception, and also about poetry, the voice, queer theory, embodiment, and performance. She is currently finishing a volume of translated texts called How to Parent: An Ancient Guide for Modern Parenting and also a monograph on desire and time in the classical canon and modern American poetry. Her next project will be a book about trees and literary imagination. 

She is also leading a project with Lucy Alford and Timothy McGinnis at the Franke Institute for the Humanities called “Poetry and the Practice of Healing,” which aims to bring together the work of poetry and that of medicine by looking for areas of intersection in the corporeality that underlies both. In the coming year (2026-27), she is also working with Timothy McGinnis on an NEA-sponsored project called “Poetry in Practice,” a program of weekly poetry workshops and quarterly public readings that supports adolescent survivors of traumatic injury on Chicago’s South Side through artistic engagement, community collaboration, and literacy excellence. She is the Chair of the Arts and Humanities Core sequence “Poetry and the Human” (PATH) and the Director of Graduate Studies for Theater and Performance Studies.

Her first book is When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2012; pb 2016). Here she explores the lyrically powerful voices of Sophocles’ heroes, arguing that their characterization is built from the poetical material of lyric genres and that this poeticity (as she calls it) lends a unique blend of power and impotence to Sophoclean heroes that places them in the mold of archaic poets as they were imagined in Classical Greece. Professor Nooter’s second book, The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (Cambridge University Press, 2017; pb 2022), is on voice in Aeschylus and Greek poetry and thought more generally. Her most recent book is called Greek Poetry in the Age of Ephemerality (Cambridge University Press, 2023). This text consists of a series of essays on Greek poems, understood as attempts at embodiment through performance and objecthood in the face of the ephemerality of human life. She is also working on a volume called How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality (Princeton University Press, 2024), and continues to work on an ongoing project on modern African drama and ancient Greek tragedy. She has co-edited a book called Sound and the Ancient Senses with Shane Butler (Routledge, 2019) and a volume with Mario Telò entitled Radical Formalisms: Reading, Theory and the Boundaries of the Classical (Bloomsbury Press, 2024). Finally, she has offered some advice on applying to and choosing graduate programs in Classics in Eidolon, and as Editor-in-Chief of Classical Philology has edited special issues on Poetry and Its Means, Athens: Stage, Page, Assembly, and Tragedy: Reconstruction and Repair.

• “Lives that bend, lines that break: time, death, and enjambment in the Iliad” TAPA, 156.1 (2026) 1-26.
• “The Sounds of Sappho and the Sense of Philology” The Philology of the Future: Essays in Honor of Jim Porter, ed. Mario Telò (Bloomsbury, 2026) 35-53.
• “Aeschylus and Optimism: Queer Theory, Totalitarianism and an End to Family”Aeschylus: Aspects of Power and Violence, ed. Roger Woodard (De Gruyter Brill, 2026).
• “Looking Back: Ancient Greek Poetry in the Age of AIDS” Classical Philology 119.2 (2024) 271-87.
• “Mourning Mourning: Sophocles, Derrida, and Delay” The Before and the After: Critical Asynchrony Now, eds. Sean Gurd and Mario Telò (Punctum Books, 2024), pp. 195-214.
• How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality (Princeton University Press, 2024)
• Radical Formalisms: Reading, Theory and the Boundaries of the Classical (Bloomsbury Press, 2024)
• Greek Poetry in the Age of Ephemerality (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
• "Disjunctive Soundscapes in Anne Carson’s Trojan Women and H of H”. Classical Antiquity: Special Issue on Anne Carson’s Euripides, ed. Laura Jansen.
• “Socrates and the voice that says no: listening to Plato’s Apology” in American Imago 79.3: 413-35.
• “Medea—Failure and the Queer Escape” in Queer Euripides: Re-Readings in Greek Tragedy, eds. Sarah Olsen and Mario Telò (Bloomsbury Press, 2022).
• “The fourth level of life: white noise in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and Plato’s Phaedrus,” Parallax 26.2 (2020).
• Sound and the Ancient Senses, co-edited with Shane Butler (Routledge, 2019).
• “The war-trumpet and the sound of domination in ancient Greek thought,” Greek and Roman Musical Studies 7.2 (2019).
• The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
• When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2012).