AFS Past President Dorothy Noyes Publishes New Book on Global Politics

Exemplarity in Global Politics (Bristol University Press, 2025), edited by folklorist Dorothy Noyes and political scientist Tobias Wille, is published today in hard copy. It was made accessible through a digital version earlier.

The book explores how political change is claimed and recognized and how is it attached to actors and transferred between them. Drawing on folkloristic theories of cultural transmission, the volume gives a new account of a mechanism that is celebrated in liberal discourse but trickier in practice: the performance and uptake of examples.

Bringing together thinkers from different disciplines and places — including folklorist Kyrre Kverndokk as well as historians, classicists, anthropologists, and scholars of international relations, this book considers the networks of reception and emulation within which a political act can become an example, circulating beyond the bounds of identities, norms, and ideologies. Tracing short- and long-term interactions among aspirational, dissident, and establishment performances, the volume reveals exemplarity to be a shaping force in global politics.

Exemplarity in Global Politics is freely available for reading online and downloading as a PDF. A 50% discount on the hard copy is valid until the end of November 2025: quote BUP11 when ordering from the press website.

Dorothy Noyes (PhD, Folklore and Folklife, University of Pennsylvania) is University Distinguished Scholar, Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English, Professor of Comparative Studies, and Director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University. She studies the traditional public sphere in Europe, the careers of policy concepts, and performance and ritual in international relations. 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); and Sustaining Interdisciplinary Collaboration: A Guide for the Academy (coauthored with Regina Bendix and Kilian Bizer; University of Illinois Press, 2017). Noyes is a past President of the American Folklore Society (2018–19), and was awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the University of Tartu in 2018. She is also an AFS Fellow and received the Kenneth Goldstein Award for Lifetime Academic Leadership from the Society in 2021.