POLIN Music Festival: Annie Dutoit
Annie Dutoit was born in Switzerland in a family of prominent classical musicians. After her secondary studies in classical languages (Greek and Latin), she moved to the United States and received a B.A. in comparative literature from Princeton University, an M.A. in journalism from New York University and a Ph.D in French and romance philology from Columbia University in New York.
Her dissertation focused on the interaction between politics and aesthetics in anti-Semitic writings in France. Dr. Dutoit has held faculty positions in various American universities, among which Barnard College in New York and more recently, Arizona State University where she taught courses in literature and European intellectual history.
During her academic career, Ms Dutoit has been invited to give talks at several international conferences on topics that encompassed fascist aesthetics, avant-garde fascism, and history and memory. She was a co-recipient of a Humanities grant on comparative genocide at Arizona State University. Ms Dutoit has taken part in several public outreach activities and performances raising awareness and memory about the Holocaust. In 2015, she recited texts of survivors of the camps and the A Bomb in Hiroshima and Tokyo in front of the Emperor of Japan for the 70th anniversary of the end of the war and has recently performed at UNESCO for the international Holocaust Day. She has collaborated with the Auschwitz foundation and Veteran Institute in Belgium on several projects, more recently on an educational documentary tracking the traces of the Shoah in Poland.
In addition, Annie Dutoit is pursuing a career in the performing arts as an actor and a producer.
