Dr Naomi Scott

@drnaomiscott.bsky.social

1286 Followers 417 Following

A.G Leventis Fellow in Greek Studies at the University of Bristol. Julius Pollux superfan. Expert in Ancient Greek jokes. My research profile: https://tinyurl.com/2fc8fbzh My book: https://tinyurl.com/2x256h64

A close up of a striped cat lying on her side on a sofa, you can see the white underside of her chin, a person’s hand is visible holding her little paw, the person is massaging the cat’s little toe beans with her thumb.
A paper sculpture of Baba Yaga and her house on chicken legs, all made from books. The sculpture sits on an open book and the paper house and woman and all the trees are made from the pages of books too. Baba Yaga has her back to the viewer and stands looking at her house among the trees, holding a staff in her left hand.
A large blue salad bowl with a mix of yellow and green julienned courgettes mixed with cherry tomatoes and Thai basil. The wooden salad servers stand in the bowl.
A giant artichoke boiling in a silver pot
A document saved as Chapter 1 draft 2. The title is visible at the top: Pollux’s Homer: remembering and dismembering the epic past. There is below the beginning of the text, starting with a passage about whether horses drink wine.
A picture of an academic book. A page entitled HOMER’S VIEW OF MAN (chapter title, visible at the top of the page). Nestled into the writing are two figures. Fig. 1 is a sort of stick man with a rounded body, like a child’s drawing of a person or perhaps a snowman. Fig. 2 is a side on view of a person in black, whose body resembles the bodies seen on very early Greek vaseware. He has a triangular upper body, chunky thighs, and holds his arms out to the left. Someone has circled fig. 2 in pencil.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-02-07-inside-herculaneum-scroll-seen-first-time-almost-2000-years
A screenshot from here: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-02-07-inside-herculaneum-scroll-seen-first-time-almost-2000-years It explains that the machine learning involves only the detection of ink
A mirror selfie. A white woman holds her phone up in front of her face. She is wearing a white dress and an enormous straw hat, with an enormous black brim and straw coloured top. She is standing in a living room in front of a grey sofa and a shelf of picture books.
A letter about how teenagers are more interested than ever in Classics, a level entries up 22% and massive expansion to state school kids, all while classics depts in universities shrink and disappear
A cat on a sofa under a blanket. The blanket corner has been lifted so you can see her daft little face peeking out.
A picture book, Inside Cat by Brendan Wenzel, sits on top of a rainbow bedspread
An enormous merc pickup truck with a personalised numberplate. The company branding reads ‘365 building solutions’ and is illustrated with a PICTURE OF THE COLISEUM and a tag underneath says ‘quality is remembered long after the cost is forgotten’
A poem by Judith Viorst, illustrated with a huge green snake by Eric Carle. The poem is called Mother Doesn’t Want A Dog and reads as follows: Mother doesn't want a dog. Mother says they smell, And never sit when you say sit, Or even when you yell. And when you come home late at night And there is ice and snow, You have to go back out because The dumb dog has to go. Mother doesn't want a dog. Mother says they shed, And always let the strangers in And bark at friends instead, And do disgraceful things on rugs, And track mud on the floor, And flop upon your bed at night And snore their doggy snore. Mother doesn't want a dog. She's making a mistake. Because, more than a dog, I think She will not want this snake.
A laptop sits on a desk surrounded by chaotic piles of books, including a 19th c edition of Pollux and literally EVERY SINGLE VOLUME of Erbse’s editions of Homeric Scholia
A gravestone commemorating Hannah Twynnoy, killed by a tiger in 1703. There is a poem: In bloom of Life She’s snatched from hence She had not room To make defence For Tiger fierce Took Life away And here she lies In a bed of Clay Until the Resurrection Day.
A cat on a chair under a small desk, splayed out and dripping off the edges.
A hand holding a green book, entitled Scholia In Aristophanem III I8 In Ranas. There are more books visible on the desk behind.
A hand holding a book, entitled Scholia in Aeschylum Pars I (edidit O L Smith). The colours in the picture are very pleasing: the book is bright orange, the nails of my hand are painted cranberry pink, and you can just see the bright red sleeve of my cardigan.
A page of the scholia on book 21 (Φ) of the Iliad
A picture of a word document with a list of fragments and quotations and their location in Pollux’s Onomasticon, some of them highlighted, and a long quotation from Eustathius.
The startled face of a cat emerges from under a duvet cover
A screenshot from the CBeebies cartoon Sarah and Duck, showing a little girl and her mallard duck on the beach. Both are staring directly at the viewer.
On top of a rumpled bed, the white tipped nose of a striped cat peeks out from under a beige and white patterned duvet.
A video of three latkes frying in a pan
The wiki entry for Euripides Thyestes. After a brief intro to the play, it states: “Pellegrino Ernetti claimed to have viewed the play being performed in ancient times, using a supposed Chronovisor time viewer, and made a transcription. This claim is unsubstantiated.”
The text confirms longform outputs are portable for five years after publication
A cat curled up asleep on a bed.
A completely illegible Greek manuscript
Two pumpkins, one orange and very large, one a little smaller & mottled green and yellow, sit atop a baking tray, tops sliced off and placed as lids, ready for the oven.
A section of Pollux’s Onomasticon (V.92) entitled περι μιξεως ζωων (pls excuse lack of diacritics, phone keyboard doesn’t offer polytonic). That translates roughly as ‘on animal sex’. There’s a list of verbs below it, all on this topic.
A brown, rectangular cake sits cooling on a countertop.
An apple cake it’s huge! The tin is 40x30!
A very pretty cat sits regally atop a velvet cushion.
A weird desk in a cubby hole in senate house library, which looks out onto a slim window, blue skies beyond. I dunno I kinda like the pseudo-monkishness of these strongly cell-adjacent desks.
A mixed media sculpture inspired by commedia dell’arte. The picture shows the back view of the figure’s cloak which is covered in badges. In the centre one reads ‘Fuck The Tories’.
Two articles listed next to one another, one my me on Sappho in Pollux and one by my other half on the Appendix Vergiliana.
A young, green tromboncino on a kitchen counter top. It is long and green and let’s be honest here it looks rude.
A picture of a German castle, yellow stone with turrets capped in grey, against a beautiful blue sky.
A door sitting ajar in a corridor. The door is grey with a sort of vertical handle in the middle which makes it look highly intriguing and like it holds some kind of Top Secret Stuff.
A pissed off looking cat who has been denied ice cream, sitting in the midst of a brio train set
Blue skies seen from high up in Senate House. You can see the white stone of the building at the bottom, and the tower on the opposite side.
A stack of paperback copies of my book, Jokes In Greek Comedy: From Puns To Poetics, lying on a table next to the box they came in.
The entrance to the OUP offices in Oxford.
Ceramic tiles depicting Erato and Thalia
A giant (and seriously this thing is fucking huge) double bass displayed next to a plaster case of an ornate column
A picture of the main hall in the new V&A storehouse. At the front, cases place random objects together (apparently organisation is based to a large degree on space efficiency), and behind the museum’s full storehouses are visible like a giant IKEA warehouse it is amazing.
The pic shows a line drawing of a car labelled ‘your manuscript as submitted’. Then a picture of an ugly monstrosity of a car with a bunch of ridiculous add ons as suggested by reviewers, such as extra wheels & odd shaped windows, labelled ‘after peer review and revision’
A picture of Woburn quads in the sun, taken from inside a window at the Warburg library.
A copy of this week’s new LRB is open on a table, showing a poem by A.E. Stallings titled ‘Anosmia’. There is a jug of pink roses behind it. In the top left corner of the picture, a chaotic mess of children’s toys and a brightly coloured play tent intrude on this otherwise calm scene.
A box of Rausken’s matzo crackers which reads ‘Low salt, low sugar, law fat guilt-free snacking’
The picture shows a section of the contents page from Asper 2013 (ed.) Writing Science: Medical and Mathematical Authorship in Ancient Greece. The absolutely bloody fabulous chapter title ‘Sing, Muse, of the Hypotenuse: Influences of Poetry and Rhetoric on the Formation of Greek Mathematics’ has been crudely highlighted in yellow.
An aryballos shaped like a hedgehog