Welcome to Ancient Greece Today

Hosted by Naomi Weiss (Professor of the Classics, Harvard University), Ancient Greece Today brings scholars together with playwrights, novelists, poets, performers, and other artists to explore the ancient Greek world and how it is used and reimagined in the present day. It introduces ancient Greek literature and its afterlife in an accessible format to a diverse audience, offering multiple forms of engagement with Greek texts and, more broadly, demonstrating the continued relevance and vitality of humanistic study and creative practice. The podcast is designed from a pedagogical perspective, with the hope that it will be used as a free resource for teachers and students.

The first season is “Tragedy Today.” Each episode is focused on a single play (or, in the case of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, three plays!) and its use, adaptation, and transformation in the 20th or 21st century, zeroing in on one modern example to explore how it responds to the tragic material and what issues it uses this framework to address.

Season One’s episodes will be released weekly starting April 9, 2026. They are as follows:

Episode 1: Greek Tragedy and Its Afterlife: An Introduction
Guests: Rosa Andújar (Barnard College, Columbia University) and Josh Billings (Princeton University)

Episode 2: Oresteia
Guests: Afroditi Angelopoulou (University of Southern California) and Larry Tye (journalist, biographer)

Episode 3: Prometheus Bound
Guests: Mark Griffith (University of California, Berkeley) and Annie Dorsen (theater director)

Episode 4: Oedipus the King
Guests: Lyndsay Coo (University of Bristol) and Janet Eilber (Artistic Director of Martha Graham Dance Company)

Episode 5: Antigone
Guests: Andrés Carrete (Harvard University), David Gaitán (actor, playwright, director), and Perla De La Rosa (actor, playwright, director)

Episode 6: Medea
Guests: Al Duncan (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Rhodessa Jones (Founder and Director of The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women)

Episode 7: Bacchae
Guests: Lucy Jackson (Durham University) and Monica Youn (poet, academic, lawyer)

Episode 8: Trojan Women
Guests: Ella Haselswerdt (University of California, Los Angeles) and Rosanna Bruno (artist, graphic novelist)

Bonus episode: Interview with Ferdia Lennon about tragedy and comedy in his novel, Glorious Exploits (2024).