Hervé Pennec – Historian

Hervé Pennec is a historian and senior researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He was a member of the Institut des mondes africains (IMAf-Aix, UMR 8171), which he co-directed from 2019 to March 2021. Since 2018, he has served as Director of the French Academic Network on African Studies (GIS Études africaines en France), a role he will hold until 2026. He was also a member of the Africa-CNRS Advisory Board from 2022 to 2024.

His research focuses on Luso-Ethiopian relations during the 16th and 17th centuries, with particular emphasis on the production of missionary writings in this region. His current work examines the formation of missionary knowledge, tracing its origins to the late 19th century.

Among his notable publications are:

• Des jésuites au royaume du Prêtre Jean (Éthiopie). Stratégies, rencontres et tentatives d’implantation (1495–1633) (Paris, Centre Culturel C. Gulbenkian, 2003);
• A Portuguese critical edition of Pedro Páez’s História da Etiópia (Lisbon, Assírio & Alvim, 2008), later translated into Spanish (2009) and English (2011) in collaboration with Isabel Boavida and Manuel João Ramos;
• An Ethiopian Mille-feuille: Unearthing the History of the Jesuit Mission to Ethiopia (16th–21st Centuries) (Lisbon, 2022), which examines the production of historical sources.

From 2026 to 2028, Hervé Pennec will lead the research project “Missionary Memory and the Forgotten Legacies of Slavery in East Africa: Field Investigations, Archaeological Inventory, and Collective Dynamics.” In anticipation of this work, he has expressed a strong commitment to collaborating with historians at East African universities to advance shared historical research.

Learn more about Hervé’s work via his  IMAf-CNRS profile  or connect with him on LinkedIn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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