Dorothy Noyes (PhD, rahvaluule ja rahvakultuur, Pennsylvania Ülikool) on Ohio Riikliku Ülikooli tunnustatud teadlane, kunstide ja teaduste tunnustatud inglise keele professor, võrdleva uurimise professor ja Mershoni rahvusvahelise julgeoleku uuringute keskuse direktor. Ta uurib Euroopa traditsioonilist avalikku sfääri, poliitiliste kontseptsioonide arengut ning rahvusvaheliste suhete performatiivset ja rituaalset külge. Tema raamatute hulka kuuluvad „Fire in the Plaça: Catalan Festival Politics After Franco” (Pennsylvania Ülikooli kirjastus, 2003), „Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life” (Indiana Ülikooli kirjastus, 2016) ja „Sustaining Interdisciplinary Collaboration: A Guide for the Academy” (kaasautorid Regina Bendix ja Kilian Bizer; Illinoisi Ülikooli kirjastus, 2017). Koos Tobias Willega toimetatud raamat „Exemplarity in Global Politics” ilmub 2025. aasta novembris Bristol University Pressi kirjastuses. Ta on Ameerika Folklore Seltsi endine president ja sai 2018. aastal Tartu Ülikoolilt audoktorikraadi.

Abstract:
What is it to be European? The tension between authenticity, modernity, and cosmopolitanism is at the core of both historic and contemporary European dilemmas of self-definition. It is nicely captured in the title and mission of Tartu's own Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore. It is, indeed, a tension more easily acknowledged at Europe's periphery than in its core, as much recent theory from southern and eastern European scholars points out. But one writer from the core was able to recognize, as early as the 1830s, the centrality of the periphery, and of folklore, to the formation of the modern European self. In this lecture, I examine this self-formation in the short fiction of Prosper Mérimée, a libertine intellectual who forged Balkan folksongs in his youth and created the French heritage bureaucracy in his maturity. He is best known for four tales (“La Vénus d’Ille,” 1837; Colomba, 1840; “Carmen,” 1847; “Lokis,” 1868) in which a fussy metropolitan folklorist on a field excursion to a frontier region is made witness to a violent, supernaturally tinged encounter between an earnest provincial man seeking to join the modern world and a shapeshifting woman seeking to exploit it. Each tale is carefully grounded in linguistic and cultural realia, and each is set in a region that evoked specific French political anxieties in the middle of the 19th century: Catalonia, Corsica, Andalusia, and Lithuanian Samogitia. Each region, although distanced in metropolitan discourse by a rhetoric of archaism and backwardness, was in fact a space of contagion that threatened to destabilize France’s precarious equilibrium and reopen the nation-state to liberal or imperial futures. Despite that suspicious French perspective, the flexible strategies of provincial actors, as elucidated by Mérimée, offer insight into current ambivalences over European belonging. More immediately, they illuminate ongoing but productive tensions in the practice of European folkloristics as it has been shaped from the periphery -- by such multilingual, migratory characters as Walter Anderson and his current heirs in Tartu.