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Lucille Toth

Headshot of Lucille Toth wearing blue earrings

Lucille Toth

Assistant Professor of French (Newark campus)
she/her/hers

toth.297@osu.edu

Areas of Expertise

  • Dance Studies
  • French and Francophone culture
  • Medical Humanities
  • Migration Studies
  • Gender and Sexuality

Education

  • PhD, University of Southern California
  • MA, University of Montreal

Lucille Toth is an Assistant Professor of French at OSU-Newark, affiliated with Ohio State Dance department. Trained in contemporary dance in France, her research interests lie at the intersection of dance, literature, medical humanities, gender and migration studies. Her first book Danses et pandémies. Du SIDA à la COVID-19  (Dance and Pandemics. From AIDS to COVID-19) traces the links between contamination and dance in France and beyond in order to challenge contemporary cultural, political and artistic metaphors about movement. Her current project Moving Bodies, Moving Borders. Being in Motion in Times of Crisis is inspired by her community work On Board(hers) which shows through dance how global mobility is part of contemporary national and global history. This work confronts migration and movement with current discourses on purity and identity.

She is the co-editor of Danse contemporaine et littérature (Paris: Centre National de la Danse, 2015) that focuses on the intersections between postmodern dance and letters in France. Her articles and reviews appear in: Dance Chronicle; Forum for Modern Language Studies; French Cultural Studies; SITES. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies; H-France Review.

In addition to being a scholar, Lucille Toth is also a choreographer and the founder and artistic director of On Board(hers), a dance project based on the testimonies of immigrants. On Board(hers) has been supported by different grants including a Coca Cola Critical Difference for Women Grant, and an Outreach Grant from OSU-Newark, and received good press coverage from NPR, Columbus Alive and WOSU, among others. As part of this project, Lucille Toth also gave a TEDxTalk in 2019 entitled “Yes she has an accent. Why don’t you?”

Lucille Toth also directed and performed in Laura Larson’s series of photographs City of Incurable Women, that challenges medical and cultural myths on women and hysteria.

Cover of the book

 

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Danses et pandémies. Du SIDA à la COVID-19: Montreal, Editions Nota Bene, coll. Varia, 2022. 

Review of Hysteria in Performance, H-Net, 2022.

De la house au ballet : décolonisation de la danse en France.” Tangence. Montreal. 125-126 (2021).  

“Mourad Merzaki,” 50 Contemporary Choreographers, Third Edition. Ed. J. Butterworth and L. Sanders, Routledge, 2021.

Praising Twerk. Why Aren’t We All Shaking Our Butt?French Cultural Studies (May 2017) 291-302.

SELECTED CHOREOGRAPHIES / PERFORMANCES / CURATORIAL WORKS

Founder and Artistic Director. On Board(hers). Since 2018.

Performer and facilitator. Distance/Climate/Access/Contact – A Four Movement Conversation. With Maurice Stevens. The Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, March 2021.

Advisory Committee Member. Summer exhibition. The Wexner Center for the Arts, 2020.

Director, dancer and model. City of Incurable Women. Series of photographs by Laura Larson. 2017-2020.

Director and performer. Repeat Pressure Until. Angela Meleca gallery, Columbus, OH. 2017.

Dramaturge. Trois décennies d’amour cerné (Three Decades of Fenced-in Love.) A contemporary ballet co-written with French choreographer Thomas Lebrun) 2013.