Anne-Marie Codur
Thank you Sherman for this invitation to this wonderful gathering of Convisero!
My name is Anne-Marie Codur. I am a scholar, teacher, performing artist and activist, with a French and American citizenships, and a bi-cultural upbringing, Catholic on my father’s side, Jewish on my mother’s side with family roots in the High Atlas mountains of Morocco. After a PhD in economics at Sciences Po Paris on the systemic approach of Sustainable Development, I moved to Boston for a Post Doc at Harvard University, where I met and joined in 1997 the founding members of the University of the Middle East Project (UME), an educational NGO devoted to peace education in the Middle East and beyond. I met Sherman in the early years of UME, around 1998, and he was a great mentor and advisor to all of us, as we were developing the first programs for high school teachers from Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, studying together and forming strong personal and professional ties. The UME network of alumni includes today more than 1000 teachers as well as dozens of NGO leaders, from throughout the MENA region. My passion for building peace bridges between Israelis and Palestinians also brought me to organize several workshops with peace activists from both sides, as a member of the academic board of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, a think tank based in DC and devoted to the teaching of strategic nonviolence to audiences of activists and dissidents from around the world.
And all along, I kept a foot in academia, as a Research associate at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, developing policy briefs, teaching modules and textbooks on environmental issues, in particular on climate change policies.
But my true self and greatest passion is music, and particularly singing. After graduating from the Conservatory in Paris in Piano and Voice, I continued in the Opera program of the New England Conservatory in voice studies. As a lyric soprano, I performed in small-scale Opera productions and also gave a series of recitals, of arias and French chansons, in France, and in the Boston area. Recently, I composed a cycle of ten songs “Somewhere beyond the fences: a journey through promised and forbidden lands” with lyrics in English, Hebrew and Arabic, a musical dialogue between two women, one Jewish and one Palestinian, on both sides of the wall… I performed several of my songs for several audiences of activists in the Middle East, in France, and in Brazil, in particular in the gatherings of the global citizen network “Dialogues en humanité” which brings together peace activists, climate activists, and concerned citizens from all walks of life, on four continents, in Lyon, Berlin, Brussels, Rabat, Dakar, Porto Novo, Bangalore, Auroville, Chandigarh, and Salvador de Bahia.
Moving forward, my desire is to integrate further my intellectual passions as a scholar and activist with my artistic carrier as a singer, by creating musical performances that educate audiences as much as they entertain and move them.
When you feel so multidimensional as I felt growing up, it is very hard to fit in the “boxes” that society likes to lock you into. I have resisted all my life to be labelled “an economist” just because I happened to have a PhD in that discipline, and I have struggled to follow all my passions at the same time, as an artist as much as an intellectual…
So when I met Sherman, the man with the thousand passions, and the unlimited energy to pursue them all, it was a true revelation! Meeting a wonderful like-minded and like-hearted man like Sherman was a living proof to me that you can (and should) live a life led by your passions to good in the world, to pursue peace, even against all odds, and to share with generosity and selflesness that passion and wisdom with the next generations. It is an honor for me to be part of this community of friends and colleagues of Sherman’s united in that same desire to make the world a better place.