Dorothy Noyes Professor of Folklore Studies, The Ohio State University (USA) Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: May 2022 Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: »Trust and Suspicion in Interdisciplinary Knowledge-Making« | »Exemplary Failures: Gesture and Emulation in Liberal Politics« Project outline: I will help the researchers at ConTrust to reflect on their own culture of interdisciplinarity, developing a reflexive account of trust and suspicion as complementary dimensions of knowledge production. Recognizing the sources of tension inherent in research collaboration, we can identify strategies to generate learning from conflict. Preliminary results of the work will be documented in a concept paper. I will also draw on the research group’s expertise to further my own monograph on exemplarity in liberal politics. Drawing on key episodes from the eighteenth century to the present, I describe a trajectory in which the mediation necessary to mass societies has extended the reach and availability of symbolic politics as an instrument. Facilitating the amplification and emulation of acts deemed exemplary, mediated transmission encourages the competitive escalation of gesture, while undoing the context of interpersonal answerability that can guarantee follow-through. (Dorothy Noyes) Research partner: Dorothy Noyes follows the invitation of the Frankfurt research initiative »ConTrust. Trust in Conflict - Political Life under Conditions of Uncertainty«. During her stay she cooperates with Tobias Wille, research associate at »ConTrust«. She will give a public lecture on »The Clemency Scenario: Trust and Scale in European Political Drama, 1787–1830«, on 9 May 2022. Scholarly profile of Dorothy NoyesDorothy Noyes is College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of English, with a joint appointment in the Department of Comparative Studies, at the Ohio State University. Noyes studies political performance and the traditional public sphere in Europe, with an emphasis on how shared symbolic forms and indirect communication facilitate coexistence in situations of endemic social conflict. She also writes on folklore theory and the international policy careers of culture concepts. Her current book projects are Exemplary Failures: Gesture and Emulation in Liberal Politics and, co-edited with Tobias Wille, The Global Politics of Exemplarity. In summer 2022 she will begin an appointment as Director of Ohio State’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies.Website: Please find more information about Dorothy Noyes here. Main areas of research: Folklore theory and history; the ethnography of performance; political and symbolic anthropology; culture concepts in international relations; Western European cultural historySelected publications:
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