Prof. Eric T. Jennings

Eric T. Jennings is a professor of history at Victoria University in the University of Toronto, specializing in modern French colonialism. 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 of 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 awards, Victoria University grants, the Alf Heggoy and Jean-François Coste book prizes as well as the Palmes académiques.

Selected Publications

Books

• Eric Jennings, La France libre fut africaine. Paris: Perrin, 2014.
  -English translation under contract with Cambridge University Press: Free French Africa in World War II, forthcoming.
• Eric Jennings, Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
  -French translation by Agathe Larcher-Goscha: La ville de l’éternel printemps: comment Dalat a permis l’Indochine française. Paris: Payot, 2013.
  -Vietnamese translation forthcoming with Hoa Sen University Press.
• Eric Jennings, Curing the Colonizers: Hydroptherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas. Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2006.
  -French translation by Eric Jennings (expanded and revised): À la cure, les coloniaux! Thermalisme, climatisme et colonisation (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011).
• Eric Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe and Indochina, 1940–1944. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
  -French translation by Eric Jennings: Vichy sous les Tropiques: La Révolution nationale à Madagascar, en Guadeloupe, en Indochine, 1940–1944 (Paris: Grasset, 2004).
• Eric Jennings, co-editor, with Jacques Cantier, of a collective volume entitled L’Empire colonial sous Vichy. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004.

Selected Articles

• Eric Jennings, "Les donneuses d'eau: Une profession aux marges et au cœur du thermalisme français, 1852–1914" forthcoming in Société et Représentations, special issue in memory of Susanna Barrows, forthcoming.
• Eric Jennings, "L’œil de Vichy à Madagascar: Le règne de terreur d’un chef de district en Imerina," Les Cahiers d’études africaines, 54:3 (211) (October 2013): 625-648.
• Eric Jennings, “The Best Avenue of Escape: the French Caribbean Route as Expulsion, Rescue, Trial, and Encounter” French Politics, Culture and Society 30:2 (Summer 2012): 33-52.
• Eric Jennings, “Confronting Rabies and its Treatments in Colonial Madagascar, 1899-1910,” The Social History of Medicine 22:2 (2009): 263-282.
• Eric Jennings, “Colons, colonisés, ou emigrés? Enjeux identitaires de l’émigration depuis Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, 1903-1939” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 54:4 (October-December 2007): 117-141.
• Eric Jennings, “Writing Madagascar back into the Madagascar Plan” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 21:2 (Fall 2007): 187-217.
• Eric Jennings, “Conservative Confluences, ‘Nativist’ Synergy: Re-inscribing Vichy's National Revolution in Indochina” French Historical Studies, special issue on “the New French Colonial History” 27:3 (Summer 2004): 601-635.
• Eric Jennings, “Remembering ‘Other’ Losses: The Temple du Souvenir Indochinois of Nogent-sur-Marne” History and Memory 15:1 (Summer 2003): 5-48.
• Eric Jennings, “Last Exit from Vichy France: The Martinique Escape Route and the Ambiguities of Emigration, 1940-41” The Journal of Modern History 74 (June 2002): 289-324.
• Eric Jennings, “La Dissidence aux Antilles, 1940-1943” Vingtième siècle, revue d'histoire 68 (October-December 2000): 55-71.