Teaching/Research

Dorothy Noyes (PhD, Folklore and Folklife, University of Pennsylvania) is University Distinguished Scholar, Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of English, and Senior Faculty Fellow of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University. She holds courtesy appointments in Comparative Studies, Anthropology, French and Italian, and Germanic Languages and Literatures. She directed Ohio State's Center for Folklore Studies 2005-2014 and the Mershon Center 2022-2026.

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 University Press, November 2025). Her current book project is Exemplary Failures: Gesture and Emulation in Liberal Politics.

Noyes has lectured, taught, or consulted in ca. 35 countries in Europe and Asia 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. Ohio State named her University Distinguished Scholar in 2021, and in 2026 the Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences gave her its Distinguished Alumni Scholar Award.

Mentoring PhD students and visiting scholars across many disciplines,  Noyes designed Ohio State's Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Folklore and a core curriculum comprising a two-part methods and a three-part theory sequence. Other courses she has redesigned or created include Cultural Diplomacy; Common Sense: Knowledge, Experience, and Social Life; Cultures of Waste and Recycling; The Fairy Tale and Reality; American Regional Cultures in Transition; and Poetry and Politics in the 20th Century Mediterranean. In her time as Mershon director she taught Literature and Leadership and, with Dakota Rudesill, the Scenario Writing Seminar: Narrative, Simulation, and National Security.
 

Curriculum Vitae