Eric Jennings

Eric T. Jennings (PhD UC Berkeley 1998) is a professor of History and Chair of the History Department (St. George) at the University of Toronto. He is also a fellow at Victoria College. Jennings is a specialist of modern France, French colonialism, and the Francophone world. His solo books include, Vanilla: the History of an Extraordinary Bean (Yale UP, 2025),  Escape from Vichy (Harvard UP, 2018), Free French Africa in World War II (Cambridge UP, 2015), Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (California, 2011), Curing the Colonizers (Duke, 2006), and Vichy in the Tropics (Stanford, 2001). He co-edited L’Empire colonial sous Vichy (Odile Jacob, 2004) with Jacques Cantier. His books have all been translated into French, and one into Vietnamese, and have won prizes, most notably the Prix de l’histoire des outre-mer, the Prix des Ambassadeurs, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize. He has held seven SSHRC Insight/sStandard research grants and two Jackman Humanities Institute fellowships. In 2014, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2025 the Pierre Chauveau Medal from the Royal Society of Canada for distinguished contributions to knowledge in the Humanities.