Dorothy Noyes

Oversight Committee Representative, 2013-2014

Dorothy Noyes is Professor at the Ohio State University with a joint appointment between the Departments of English and Comparative Studies and courtesy appointments in Anthropology, French and Italian, and Germanic Languages and Literatures; she also teaches in the Program in International Studies. She is a Research Associate at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and served as Director of the Center for Folklore Studies from 2005 to 2014. Her ethnographic and historical research addresses the traditional public sphere in Romance-speaking Europe; she also writes on folklore theory and on the international policy careers of culture concepts. She is the author of 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); and the forthcoming Sustaining Interdisciplinary Collaboration: A Guide for the Academy (coauthored with Regina F. Bendix and Kilian Bizer, University of Illinois Press, April 2017). Her current book project is Exemplary Failures: Gesture and Reciprocity in Democratic Reform, and she is also trying to figure out the nature of common sense. Elected Fellow of the American Folklore Society in 2005, she has served on the executive boards of both AFS and the Société Internationale d'Ethnologie et de Folklore, and lectured or taught in 15 countries. Her interdisciplinary projects have included a six-year stint as Fellow of the Göttingen Interdisciplinary Working Group on Cultural Property. Among her courses are American Regional Cultures in Transition, Cultures of Waste and Recycling, Cultural Diplomacy, and Poetry and Politics in the 20th Century Mediterranean.