Simon Kitson
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Simon Kitson, British Historian
Born in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, Kitson was educated at King Edward's School, Bath, doing his undergraduate studies at the University of Ulster and his post-graduate studies at the University of Sussex, under the supervision of Professor Roderick Kedward. He now lectures in French Studies at the University of Birmingham.
Kitson is a specialist on Vichy France on which he published Vichy et la Chasse aux Espions Nazis with Autrement of Paris in 2005. This book underlined the complexity of Vichy's policy of collaboration with the Nazi occupier. While Vichy collaborated significantly, rounding up Jews and forced labourers and cracking down on the Resistance, Kitson showed that simutaneously the regime was arresting intelligence agents working for the Nazis. The author attributed this to a desire to preserve sovereignty- in other words to be able to collaborate from a position of strength.
He is the grandson of the geologist Albert Ernest Kitson.
Publications
- The Hunt for Nazi Spies, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007
- Vichy et la chasse aux espions nazis, Paris, Autrement, 2005
- (with Hanna Diamond) Vichy, Resistance, Liberation (essays in honour of Rod Kedward), Oxford, Berg, 2005
- Vichy web-page http://artsweb.bham.ac.uk/vichy/
