Nicole Watts
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Associate Professor, Political Science Department
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Nicole Watts is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Political Science, where she teaches on comparative politics, Middle East politics, and social movements. Her research interests include ethnopolitical and national movements, state-society relations, and Kurdish politics and mobilization, particularly in Turkey. She is a graduate of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London (1992) and the University of Washington in Seattle (2001).
Watts is the author of numerous book chapters and articles in refereed journals, including the International Journal of Middle East Studies, New Perspectives on Turkey, and Ethnopolitics. Her book Activists in Office: Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey was published by the University of Washington Press in 2010. She has also made a short documentary entitled Campaigning with Osman: An Alternative Kurdish Struggle (2006). The film documents a pro-Kurdish election campaign for mayor in Diyarbakir, southeast Turkey.
Watts is a board member of the Turkish Studies Association and an associate editor of the European Journal of Turkish Studies (EJTS), a refereed, on-line scholarly journal. In 2009 she edited a special EJTS issue on state-society relations in Turkey’s Kurdish southeast. She also co-edited a collection of essays called Breaking Up the Party: Political Parties and Social Forces in Turkey with contributions from scholars in Turkey, France, and the US.
Watts makes regular visits to Turkey and has presented papers at many conferences and centers around the world. Most recently, she gave presentations on Kurdish politics at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, DC; the Center for Kurdish Studies Center at the University of Exeter in the UK; at the institute for the Study of Islam and Societies of the Muslim World (IISMM) in Paris, France; and at Salahadin University in Erbil (Hawler), Iraqi Kurdistan.
