Laure Guilbert holds a PhD in history from the European University Institute in Florence and works as an independent scholar. She is an associate member of the Centre for Social History of Contemporary Worlds at Paris 1 University and of the Institut Convergences Migrations at the Condorcet Campus. Her research explores political history, forced migration, cultural memory and the neglected heritage of Central European dance communities in the twentieth century. Her fieldwork and oral history investigations in Europe, the United States, and Israel have been supported by a number of foundations and research centres. She is the author of Danser avec le IIIe Reich: Les danseurs modernes sous le nazisme (Dancing with the Third Reich: modern dancers under Nazi rule). She regularly teaches the history of the performing arts at universities and cultural institutions, and she co-founded the Association des Chercheurs en Danse (aCD) along with its online journal, Recherches en danse. Between 2002 and 2018, she was responsible for dance publications at the Paris Opera. In 2024, she curated the exhibition Paula Padani. La danse migrante: Hamburg, Tel Aviv, Paris (Paula Padani: Migrant dance – Hamburg, Tel Aviv, Paris) at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- “Paula Padani, une danse sur le fil de la vie: Aller-retour Europe-Palestine mandataire”. Archives juives: Revue d’histoire des Juifs de France. Forthcoming 2025.
- “Le monde selon Leni Riefenstahl: Olympia ou le trouble dans le regard”. In Concourir!? Histoire et dynamique des concours de danse, edited by Laetitia Basselier and Laurent Sebillotte. Centre National de la Danse. Forthcoming 2025.
- “Danse, circulations, migrations: Polyphonie d’un nouveau chantier de recherche”. In Danses traversées: Carrières, genre, circulations, edited by Sarah Andrieu and Marina Nordera. L’Harmattan, 2025.
- “Entre deux rives: Entretien avec la chorégraphe argentine Marilén Iglesias-Breuker”. In La danse est un art de combats, edited by Marilén Iglesias-Breuker. Ressouvenances, 2023.
- “The Micro-Gestures of Survival: Searching for the Forgotten Traces”. In The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance, edited by Naomi M. Jackson, Rebecca Pappas, and Toni Shapiro-Phim. Oxford University Press, 2022.
- “De l’expressionnisme allemand au Tanztheater”. In Nouvelle histoire de la danse en Occident: De la préhistoire à nos jours, edited by Laura Cappelle. Seuil, 2020.
