About Nicole F Watts

Phone:

(415) 405-2470

Title: 

Professor/Chair

Additional Title: 

Department Chair

Department: 

Political ScienceCollege of Liberal and Creative Arts

Building: 

Humanities (HUM)

HUM
304C

 

At SF State Since:

2003

Bio:

Nicole F. Watts is a professor in the Dept of Political Science. She teaches comparative politics, nonfiction writing, social movements, nationalism, and the politics of the Middle East and North Africa. Her research interests include protest and dissent, state-society relations, and Kurdish Studies, particularly in Iraq and Turkey. She's also an Irish set dancer, ex-newspaper reporter, dog agility trainer/competitor, hiker, and plodding but committed runner. 

Watts is the author and editor of two scholarly books and many chapters and articles. Her debut work of narrative nonfiction, Republic of Dreams: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Struggles, and the Future of Iraqi Kurdistan, was published by New York University Press in January 2025  (https://nyupress.org/9781479823062/republic-of-dreams/). Based on more than 10 years of research and field work, it marries the recent political history of Kurdish Iraq with the extraordinary coming-of-age story of a boy named Peshawa, taking readers deep inside ordinary people’s efforts to rebuild their community and bring democracy to Iraqi Kurdistan after genocide and war.

Other publications include a 2021 chapter, “Street Protest and Opposition in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq,” in The Cambridge History of the Kurds, “Re-Claiming Halabja,” in The Kurdish Question Revisited (2017) and “The Spring in Sulaimani: Kurdish Protest and Political Identities,” in Political Identities and Popular Uprisings in the Middle East (2016). She was also an occasional contributor to the Washington Post/Monkey Cage.

Watts co-edited (with Elise Massicard) Negotiating Political Power in Turkey: Breaking up the Party (Routledge 2012), and her book Activists in Office: Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey was published by the University of Washington Press in 2010. The Turkish edition, Sandıkla Meydan Okumak: Tűrkiye’de Kűrtlerin Siyasi Yolculuğu (translated by Bilgesu Sűmer) was published in 2014 by Iletişim Publishing in Istanbul. Her work has appeared in a number of other refereed journals, including the International Journal of Middle East Studies; New Perspectives on Turkey; and Ethnopolitics.

She has an MFA in Creative Writing from SF State (2022), a PhD from the University of Washington in Seattle (2001), an MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London (1992), and an undergrad history degree from the Univ of Washington (1989).