Simon Kitson

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Simon Kitson is a 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. His doctoral thesis on the Marseille Police, examined by Professors Mark Mazower and Clive Emsley, was given an award by the Institut des Hautes Etudes de la Sécurité Intérieure- the first work of non-French origin to receive such an accolade. The thesis examined how the attitude of ordinary police officers evolved- their involvement in Resistance, Collaboration and the rounding-up of Jews to be deported for the Holocaust.

Kitson is a specialist on Vichy France on which he published Vichy et la Chasse aux Espions Nazis with Autrement of Paris in 2005 and The Hunt for Nazi Spies with the University of Chicago Press in 2008. He 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.

Kitson now lectures in French Studies at the University of Birmingham where he has set up an important web resource on Vichy France. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

[edit] Publications

The Hunt for Nazi Spies, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008
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
'The Marseille Police in their context from Popular Front to Liberation', D Phil thesis, University of Sussex, 1995