Noyes Lecture

The Human Scale

Admonitions From Opera and Folktale

Join us for a special evening with Dorothy Noyes (B.A. ’83, English), a world-renowned folklorist and director of Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Security Studies.

In her lecture, "The Human Scale: Admonitions From Opera and Folktale," Noyes will compare 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.

"The Human Scale," a lecture by Dorothy Noyes

Thursday, February 26

4:00 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.

Indiana Memorial Union (IMU)
Solarium
900 E. 7th St.
Bloomington, IN 47405

RSVP below

Drawing on what she learned as an undergraduate in Bloomington, Noyes' presentation will explore how each performance sought to give timely warning to powerful actors at a time of radical change in the social order.

Honoring a distinguished career

In addition to her lecture, the College will present Noyes with its Distinguished Scholar Award, recognizing her extraordinary contributions to folklore and ethnographic research. The author of numerous celebrated books of scholarship, Noyes has lectured, taught, or consulted in over 30 countries and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Tartu in Estonia (2018). Read more about her career and publications below.

We hope you'll join us for this event! If you have any questions, please contact Director of Alumni Engagement Vanessa Cloe.

RSVP for the event

More about Dorothy Noyes

Dorothy Noyes (B.A. ’83, English) earned her Ph.D. in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania and currently serves as a university distinguished scholar and as a distinguished professor of English, professor of comparative studies, and director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University. 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.

Questions?

If you have any questions about this event, please e-mail Director of Alumni Engagement Vanessa Cloe.