Eric T. Jennings

Eric Jennings’ areas of interest include 19th and 20th century France, French colonialism, decolonization, and the francophone world.In 2001, he published Vichy in the Tropics (Stanford University Press, translated into French with Grasset in 2004 under the title Vichy sous les tropiques), a book derived from his Berkeley thesis that explored the ultra-conservative and authoritarian Vichy regime’s colonial politics in the French Caribbean, Indochina, and Madagascar. Curing the Colonizers (Duke University Press, 2006, translated into French as A la Cure les Coloniaux! PUR, 2011) was situated at the crossroads of the histories of colonialism, medicine, culture, leisure, and tourism. His Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (University of California Press, 2011, translated into French with Payot as La ville de l’éternel printemps, 2013) is a multi-angled study of the major French colonial hill station in Southeast Asia. Its focus lies on place, power, and colonial fault lines. His book on French Equatorial Africa and Cameroon under Free French rule, entitled La France libre fut africaine, appeared with Perrin in 2014, and is being translated into English with Cambridge University Press. It considers the centrality of sub-Saharan Africa for the early Fighting French movement, paying special attention to issues of legitimacy and coercion. His other publications include an edited volume with Jacques Cantier, L’Empire colonial sous Vichy (Odile Jacob, 2004), as well as many articles and chapters straddling the histories of France, Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, Africa, and the Caribbean.Jennings has received a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship (2014), SSHRC and CIHR grants, the Alf Heggoy and Jean-François Coste book prizes as well as the Palmes académiques.