DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH AND ITALIAN

Éric Essono Tsimi is Associate Professor of French and affiliated faculty in the Program of African Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in French Civilization and Cultural Studies from the University of Virginia (2019), a joint doctorate in Arts and Letters and Psychology from Université Grenoble Alpes and the University of Lausanne (2017), and an M.A. in Intercultural Communication from the Università della Svizzera italiana (2015). His work is anchored in Francophone literatures and cultures. He examines how writers, languages, and institutions produce literary authority and how African texts enter canons and markets. A related line of inquiry considers the ways literary form registers migration, racialization, and postcolonial state power. Close reading and literary history guide this research, in conversation with decolonial criticism, cultural theory, media studies, and political thought. Questions of authorship connect his books, from the racialized terms through which African literature is classified and valued to counter-utopian form, antiracist discourse, and the technologies now mediating writing. In 2023, he held a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers at the University of Bayreuth. He is Editor of African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal (Routledge / Taylor & Francis) and serves on the scientific committee of the De Gruyter series Imaginarios del futuro / Imaginaires du futur.

Essono Tsimi, Éric. L’Auteur face à l’IA: Création littéraire, modèles de langage, équité. UGA Éditions, 2026.

Essono Tsimi, Éric. New Bell de nuit. Les Lettres Mouchetées, 2026.

Essono Tsimi, Éric. Le métier d’aimer. L’Harmattan, 2013.