Dorothy Noyes, a world-renowned folklorist and director of The Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Security Studies, received the 2026 Distinguished Alumni Scholar Award from the Indiana University (IU) College of Arts and Sciences and delivered a lecture at IU on February 26.

Dorothy Noyes (B.A., English, IU-Bloomington) earned her Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania and currently serves at Ohio State as University Distinguished Scholar, Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of English, Professor of Comparative Studies, and Director of the Mershon Center. She also holds courtesy appointments in anthropology, French and Italian, and Germanic languages and literatures. From 2005 to 2014, she directed Ohio State’s Center for Folklore Studies and created its graduate interdisciplinary specialization in Folklore, for which she designed the core curriculum. As Mershon director since 2022, she has developed the center’s cross-disciplinary mission to capture the human factor in security studies.

Noyes studies political performance and ritual, the traditional public sphere in Europe, and the careers of culture concepts. Among her books are Fire in the Plaça: Catalan Festival Politics After Franco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life (Indiana University Press, 2016); Sustaining Interdisciplinary Collaboration: A Guide for the Academy, co-authored with Regina F. Bendix and Kilian Bizer (University of Illinois Press, 2017); and Exemplarity in Global Politics, co-edited with Tobias Wille (Bristol Studies in International Theory, November 2025). Her current book project is Exemplary Failures: Gesture and Emulation in Liberal Politics.

Noyes has lectured, taught, or consulted in over 30 countries and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Tartu in Estonia (2018). She is a fellow of the American Folklore Society and served the society as president in 2018 and 2019. In 2021, she received its Kenneth Goldstein Award for Lifetime Academic Leadership.

In her lecture, "The Human Scale: Admonitions From Opera and Folktale," Noyes compared Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito and the Kathlamet Sun's Myth to show how performances across time and culture have been used to warn leaders about the dangers of distancing themselves from their societies. Noyes' presentation explored how each performance sought to give timely warning to powerful actors at a time of radical change in the social order. Listen to "The Human Scale."

Photo: Jessica Turner (American Folklore Society "AFS" Director), Jason Jackson (AFS President), Dorothy Noyes, Diane Goldstein, Henry Glassie (all past AFS Presidents).