DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH AND ITALIAN

Éric Essono Tsimi is Associate Professor of French. His research focuses on Francophone African literature and cultural theory, with particular attention to how African and Afro-diasporic writers negotiate authorship, authority, and political responsibility across literature, criticism, and public discourse. He works on decolonial critique, counter-utopian imaginaries, and the ethical stakes of literary production in contexts shaped by racialization, migration, and postcolonial state power. He has published a dozen books including De quoi la littérature africaine est-elle la littérature ? (Presses de l’Université de Montréal), Vous autres civilisations savez désormais que vous êtes mortelles (Classiques Garnier),and Les Inadmirables (Hermann). His articles have appeared in venues such as African Literature Today, Contemporary French Civilization, L'Autre, and French Studies in Southern Africa, among others, and engage questions at the intersection of literary studies, critical theory, cultural psychology, and political thought. He is also a novelist and awarded playwright. His current projects examine oral traditions and archival materials in relation to contemporary debates on authorship, including the implications of generative and agentic AI for literary creation. He is also developing work on dissent, sovereignty, and political imagination in the Global South. Alongside his academic writing, he contributes essays and commentary to international media and engages public conversations on identity, language politics, and governance.