Nicole F Watts
Nicole F Watts
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Professor
Political Science, College of Liberal and Creative Arts
Bio:
Nicole F. Watts is a professor in the Dept of Political Science. In 2025-26 she's teaching on comparative politics, democracy and authoritarianism, (outer) space politics and policies, and writing in political science. She also teaches a course on Politics As Story -- how to turn deeply researched topics on politics and governance into accessible, fun-to-read, informative projects. Her new research lies at the intersection of politics and space exploration, examining activism, cooperation, and competition for resources and "the right to make the rules" in terrestrial and extraterrestrial space-related activities. Her prior work explored protest and dissent, state-society relations, and Kurdish politics, 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 narrative nonfiction book, 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. In late January 2025 she did a book launch and "thank you" tour in Iraqi Kurdistan. See one of her favorite interviews here (Diwaxan Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZHpT3ZW25E&t=28s)
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).