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Faculty Profile

Eric Jennings' areas of interest include 19^th and 20^th century France, French colonialism, decolonization, and the francophone world.  His current project is a study of French Equatorial Africa under Free French rule. Titled "La France libre fut africaine," it considers the centrality of FEA for the early Free French movement, paying special attention to issues of legitimacy and coercion. His Dalat, the Making and Undoing of France in Indochina (U. California Press, 2011) is a multi-angled study of a French colonial hill station in Southeast Asia. Its focus lies on place, power, and colonial fault lines. Curing the Colonizers (Duke UP, 2006) was situated at the crossroads of the histories of colonialism, medicine, culture, leisure, and tourism. In 2001, Jennings published Vichy in the Tropics (Stanford UP translated into French with Grasset in 2004 under the title Vichy sous les tropiques) a book that explored the ultra-conservative and authoritarian Vichy regimes colonial politics, and the formation of new colonial identities in the French Caribbean, Indochina, and the island of Madagascar. His other publications include an edited volume with Jacques Cantier, L'Empire colonial sous Vichy (Odile Jacob, 2004), as well as many articles straddling the histories of France, Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, Africa, and the Caribbean.