Michael Watts

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This article is about the Berkeley Professor. For the DJ of this name, see Michael 5000 Watts.

Michael J. Watts is Chancellor's Professor of Geography and Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the eyes of some a leading critical intellectual figure of the academic left. An intensively productive scholar, he works on a variety of themes from African development to contemporary photography, informed - so it is said - by an abiding commitment to Marxian political economy.

Raised between Bath and Bristol in the UK, Watts received his bachelor's degree in geography and economics from London's University College in 1972 and his PhD in 1979 from the University of Michigan. His PhD work was on agrarian change and politics in Northern Nigeria, published at Silent Violence in 1983. He joined the faculty of the Geography Department at UC Berkeley in 1979, and served from 1994 to 2004 as Director of the Institute of International Studies, a program that promotes cross-disciplinary global and transnational research and training. Watts was named a 2003 Guggenheim fellow for his research on oil politics in Nigeria.

Watts is married to Mary Beth Pudup, who is a UC Santa Cruz faculty member, and has two children.

[edit] Books

Retort collective (Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts). 2005. Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. London: Verso.
Peet, R & Watts, MJ (eds). 2004. Liberation Ecologies (2nd edition). Routledge. (first edition 1996)
Peluso N. and MJ Watts (eds.). 2001. Violent Environments. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Watts, MJ. 2000. The Hettner Lectures: Geographies of Violence. Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg.review
Johnston RJ, D Gregory, G Pratt, MJ Watts, DM Smith. (eds) 2000. Dictionary of Human Geography. Oxford: Blackwell.
Watts, MJ and P Little (eds.) 1997. Globalizing Agro-Food. Routledge.
RJ Johnson, P Taylor, and MJ Watts (eds.) 1995. Geographies of Global Change. Blackwell.
Watts, MJ. 1983. Silent Violence. University of California Press.

[edit] Recent articles

Watts, MJ. 2004. Resource Curse? Governmentality, Oil and Power in the Niger Delta, Nigeria. Geopolitics [Special issue] 9/1.
Watts, MJ. 2003. Thinking With the Blood. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 24/2.
Watts, MJ. 2003. Development and Governmentality. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 24/1, pp. 6-34.
Watts, MJ. 2003. Alternative Modern: Development as Cultural Geography, in S. Pile, N. Thrift and K. Anderson M. Domosh, (eds)., Handbook of Cultural Geography, Sage: London, pp. 433-453.
Watts, MJ. 2002. Migrations. Commentary on Sebastia Salgado. Occasional Paper # 26, Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley, pp. 35-42.
Watts, MJ. 2002. Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Some Thoughts on Peasants and the Agrarian Question. Oesterreichische Zeitschrift fuer Geschichtswissenschaften, 4, pp. 22-51 (and commentary pp. 51-61).
Watts, MJ. 2002. Hour of darkness. Geographica Helvetica, 57/1, pp. 5-18.
Watts, MJ. 2002. Green Capitalism, Green Governmentality. American Behavioral Scientist, 45/9, pp.1313-1317.
Watts, MJ. 2001. Lost in Space. Progress in Human Geography, 25/4, pp. 625-628.
Watts, MJ. 2001. "2001 Black Acts", New Left Review, 9, pp.125-140.
Watts, MJ. 2000. "1968 and all that...", Progress in Human Geography, 25/2, pp.157-188.
Watts, MJ. 2000. "Violent Geographies: speaking the unspeakable and the politics of space", City and Society, XIII/1,pp.83-115.
Watts, MJ. 2000. "Development Ethnographies", Ethnography 2/2, pp.283-300.
Watts, MJ. 2000. "Development at the Millennium", Geographische Zeitschrift, 88/2, pp.67-93.
Watts, MJ. 2000."Political Ecology", in T. Barnes and E. Sheppard (eds.), A Companion To Economic Geography, Oxford, Blackwell, pp.257-275.
Watts, MJ. 2000. "The Great Tablecloth", in G. Clark, M. Gertler and Feldmann (eds.), A Handbook of Economic Geography. London, Oxford University Press, pp.195-215.
Watts, MJ. 1999. "Islamic Modernities," in James Halston (ed)., Cities and Citizenship, Durham, Duke University Press, pp. 67-102.
Watts, MJ. 1999. "Collective Wish Images: Geographical Imaginaries and the Crisis of Development," in John Allen and Doreen Massey (eds.), Human Geography Today, Cambridge, Polity Press, pp. 85-107.