Dorothy Noyes, UT honorary-doctor-to-be, to deliver a lecture on Catalan festival traditions and politics on November 30

Professor Dorothy Noyes (The Ohio State University) to deliver a guest lecture “Whatever Happened to Convivència? Festival and Collective Performance from the Spanish Transition to the Catalan Crisis” on Friday, November 30 at 2:15 pm at the Institute of Cultural Studies (Ülikooli 16), room 212. All are welcome!

Traditional festival offered a potent resource for Catalonia's transition to democracy in the late 1970s. Shared flexible repertoires mediated ideological difference to facilitate collective action. Festival forms have proliferated since, and the recent Catalan independence movement recruited them again to mobilize public opinion. This time, however, instead of vitalizing convivència, the performances contributed to a misrecognition of the wider political environment. What happened? I return to fieldwork conducted in Catalonia in 1989–1993 to show how economic and political changes already then in view have altered the social base of traditional practices and contributed to political polarization.

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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 serves as the President of the American Folklore Society in 2018–2019.

Professor Noyes is a highly esteemed scholar of festival and political performance and an outstanding specialist in folklore theory and history.

Her monograph „Fire in the Placa: Catalan Festival Politics After Franco“ (2003, University of Pennsylvania Press) and numerous articles, a selection of which where collected and republished under the title Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life (2016, Indiana University Press), have become canonical texts in folklore studies.

Her path-breaking research, which combines folklore studies with insights drawn from political science and international relations, has opened up new opportunities for scholars interested in exploring expressive culture as a means of agency in diverse contexts, past and present. She has recently reflected on her interdisciplinary experiences in Sustaining Interdisciplinary Collaboration: A Guide for the Academy (2017, University of Illinois Press), coauthored with Regina F. Bendix and Kilian Bizer, and her current project, Exemplary Failures: Gesture, Pedagogy, and Progress in Liberal Politics, brings the methods of folklore study to bear on canonical Western texts and actors. 

Dorothy Noyes has made determined, fruitful efforts to create, facilitate and strengthen relations between folklorists working on different continents and within diverse scholarly traditions. In recognition of her major contribution to international folkloristics and fruitful cooperation with the University of Tartu, the university is pleased to confer upon Dorothy Noyes the Degree of Honorary Doctor in Folkloristics at the  conferment ceremony on December 1, 2018.

Tartu Ülikooli audoktorid.

Information: Ülo Valk, Professor of Estonian and Comparative Folklore, ulo.valk [ät] ut.ee, 737 5310.

The lecture is supported by European Regional Development Fund (the University of Tartu ASTRA Project PER ASPERA).