Research Interests

• Ancient literary criticism and literary theory

• Greek drama and oratory

• Performance and the body

• Modernist reception

Nancy 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. 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.

Professor 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, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She teaches courses in Classics and Comparative Literature such as The Classical Tradition, Ancient Literary Criticism, and Tragic Bodies, as well as Greek language courses.

Selected Publications

Virginia Woolf's Greek Tragedy. Bloomsbury, 2019.

Tragic Bodies: Edges of the Human in Greek Drama. Bloomsbury, 2021.

Landscape and the Spaces of Metaphor in Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism.

Cambridge University Press (2015).

Place, Space, and Landscape in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture, ed.

K. Gilhuly and N. Worman. Cambridge University Press (2014).

Abusive Mouths in Classical Athens. Cambridge University Press (2008).

The Cast of Character: Style in Greek Literature.  University of Texas Press

(2002).

"Euripides, Aristophanes, and Sophistic Style." 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 Aesthetics,

Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, ed. P. Destrée and P. Murray (Blackwell, 2015), 291-306.