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Dorothy Noyes

Dorothy Noyes

Dorothy Noyes

Director, Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Studies

noyes.10@osu.edu

1010G Derby Hall
154 N Oval Mall
Columbus, OH 43210

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Education

  • Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, Department of Folklore and Folklife (1992)
  • M.A., University of Pennsylvania, Department of Folklore and Folklife (1987)
  • B.A., Indiana University, Department of English (1983)

Teaching/Research

Dorothy Noyes (PhD, Folklore and Folklife, University of Pennsylvania) is University Distinguished Scholar, Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of English, Professor of Comparative Studies, and Director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University. She holds courtesy appointments in Anthropology, French and Italian, and Germanic Languages and Literatures. Since summer 2022 she has served as the Director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies; in 2005-2014 she directed Ohio State's Center for Folklore 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 University Press, November 2025), which is available through open access starting October 23, 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. Ohio State named her University Distinguished Scholar in 2021.

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 has taught Literature and Leadership and, with Dakota Rudesill, the Scenario Writing Seminar: Narrative, Simulation, and National Security.

Curriculum Vitae

Mershon Projects

"Exemplarity: Performance, Influence, and Friction in Political Innovation" (2019-2020)
Sustainable Pluralism: Linguistic and Cultural Resilience in Multiethnic Societies, with Brian Joseph (2014-15)
Tales of Trickery, Tales of Endurance: Gender, Performance, and Politics in the Islamic World and Beyond, with Margaret Mills (2011-12)
Making Sense in Afghanistan: Interaction and Uncertainty in International Interventions, with Margaret Mills (2009-10)
The Race in Culture: Ethnology and Empire in the Long Twentieth Century, with Alice Conklin (2008-09)
Culture Archives and the State: Between Socialism, Nationalism and the Global Market, with Margaret Mills (2006-07)
Convivencia: Performance, Public Space, and Democratization in Plural Societies (1999-2002)