Dr. Éric Fournier (born and raised in Québec, Canada) has a BA (History and Classics) and MA (Ancient History) from the Université de Montréal, and completed his doctoral studies on ancient and late antique history in 2008, at the University of California – Santa Barbara. He has since been teaching ancient and medieval history at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, where he holds the rank of Professor of History.
His research focuses on North Africa in the late antique period, particularly the Vandal era, Victor of Vita (the most important contemporary narrative source on the Vandals), and power struggles between bishops and civic government. This led him to analyze the role of exile in the treatment of bishops by late antique rulers, from Constantine to the Vandals and beyond, and to compare the measures these rulers used against bishops with the discourse of persecution that victims of these measures deployed to attack these same rulers’ legitimacy. One result of these efforts was a collection of essays, Heirs of Roman Persecution (Routledge, 2020), that he co-edited with Wendy Mayer. He is currently working on another collection of essays on women and gender in the post-Roman kingdoms of the Western Mediterranean, which he is co-editing with Maijastina Kahlos. And starting another co-edited venture with Susan Stevens, the Brill Companion to North Africa during the Vandal Century.
During his stay at ISAW, he will be working on a monograph that studies the intertextual allusions to martyrological literature in the North African Christian texts of the post-Constantinian period, when persecutions had supposedly ended. He analyzes these allusions through the lenses of cultural trauma and cultural memory theories, as well as through purity and pollution discourse. The monograph, tentatively titled Us and Them: Purity, Pollution, Trauma, and Cultural Memory of the Martyrs in Christian North Africa (2nd to 6th centuries), will provide new perspectives on the various intra-Christian conflicts that dominated the period.
Key Publications:
“‘Words as Weapons, Sharper Than Knives’. Intertextuality in Vandal Martyrological Literature: From the Maccabees, to Cyprian, to the Passion of the Seven Monks.” In The Vandal Renaissance. Latin Literature in Post-Roman Africa (435-534CE), ed. Michael Hanaghan et al. Leiden–Boston: Brill, forthcoming.
“Eternal Persecutions: Cultural Memory, Trauma and Martyrs in Vandal North Africa.” In The Making of Saints in Late Antique North Africa, ed. Sabine Panzram and Nathalie Klinck, 305-35. “Beiträge zur Hagiographie.” Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, forthcoming.
“Anticipating Disasters: Forbearance and the Limits of Religious Coercion in Late Roman North Africa.” Studies in Late Antiquity [special issue: Bishops, Barbarians, and Responses to Crisis, ed. Samuel Cohen] 8.1 (2024): 65-99.