Faculty Research Fellow
Eric T. Jennings (Ph.D. University of California-Berkeley, 1998) is Distinguished Professor of France and Francophone History. His areas of expertise include modern France, French colonialism, decolonization, and the francophone world. He is the author of seven books and an edited volume, the most recent of which is Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean (Harvard, 2018). It explores the experiences of some 5,000 refugees who fled mainland France via the island of Martinique in 1940-1941, analyzing the ensuing confluences between Surrealism and Négritude. He has also authored over sixty refereed chapters and articles straddling the histories of France, Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, Africa, and the Caribbean. These include contributions to the following edited volumes: L’Histoire mondiale de la France; World War II in the West Indies; Africa and World War II; The Routledge History of Western Empires; The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism (forthcoming), and The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War (forthcoming). In addition to English and French, some of his work has also appeared in Vietnamese, Bengali, Korean, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, German, and Chinese. He has received a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship, as well as a CIHR grant and six Standard/Insight SSHRC grants. In 2011-2012 he held a six-month JHI Faculty Research Fellowship, and we are delighted to welcome him back.
Fellowship Research Project—Vanilla Labourers: 1841-2000
This project is a component of a monograph tentatively titled A World History of Vanilla (under contract, Yale University Press). It will examine the history of vanilla labour in the nineteenth century from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives including environmental studies, gender studies, French studies, colonial commodity studies, visual studies, African/Indian Ocean studies, and food studies. Vanilla’s moment of globalization is deeply connected to slavery, but in different ways and with different chronologies than cotton or sugar. Prior to 1841, Mexico held a small near-monopoly over vanilla output. In 1841, an enslaved Black teenager named Edmond – subsequently given the surname Albius upon emancipation in 1848 – completely transformed the vanilla sector. He discovered an efficient way of artificially pollinating the vanilla orchid in a matter of seconds with a toothpick or a needle. My project will contextualize his status as a so-called “specialist slave,” the ways he acquired botanical knowledge, as well as his triumphs, trials and tribulations, rooted in local and global contexts.