Reporting by The Mershon Center for International Security Studies.

Dorothy Noyes, a world-renowned folklorist and director of The Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Security Studies, received the 2026 Distinguished Alumni Scholar Award from the Indiana University (IU) College of Arts and Sciences and delivered a lecture at IU on February 26.

Dorothy Noyes (B.A., English, IU-Bloomington) earned her Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania and currently serves at Ohio State as University Distinguished Scholar, Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of English, Professor of Comparative Studies, and Director of the Mershon Center. 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.