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?”