Professor Nooter writes about Greek drama and modern reception, and also about poetry, the voice, embodiment, and performance. 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 is now co-editing 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.
Edward Olson Professor in the Department of Classics; Committee on Theater and Performance Studies; and the College
Director of Graduate Studies, Committee on Theater and Performance Studies
Biography
Current and Recent Courses
TAPS
24720/34720
Medea and the Making of Theater
Arts & Humanities Day 2026
UChicago Classics scholars on why we keep returning to Homer.What makes The Odyssey one of the world's most enduring stories—and why do artists keep reinventing it? Classics professors Emily Austin, Sarah Nooter, and Patrice Rankine explore what is gained and contested whenever an ancient epic is brought into a modern medium and historical moment. Together, they’ll consider how adaptations invite us to read Homer anew and ask whether fidelity to a classic matters for its continued relevance. This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.Speaker(s): Emily Austin, Patrice Rankine, and Sarah Nooter