Nicole F. Watts

Nicole F. Watts serves as Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Political Science at San Francisco State University since 2016. Her academic expertise spans comparative politics with specialized focus on social movements, nationalism, and Middle East and North Africa politics, particularly Kurdish political mobilization in Turkey and Iraq.

Watts earned her MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London (1992) and PhD from the University of Washington in Seattle (2001). In spring 2022, she completed an additional MFA degree in Creative Writing at SF State, demonstrating her interdisciplinary approach to scholarship.

Her research centers on protest and dissent, ethnopolitical movements, state-society relations, and Kurdish politics. With over ten years of field research in Iraqi Kurdistan, Watts examines community rebuilding and democratization efforts following genocide and war. Her work uniquely blends rigorous academic analysis with narrative storytelling techniques.

Watts' scholarly output reveals consistent thematic focus on Kurdish political movements across Turkey and Iraq, particularly how ordinary citizens navigate authoritarian contexts and post-conflict reconstruction. Her publications demonstrate methodological diversity, combining ethnographic fieldwork with historical analysis and narrative nonfiction approaches.

She has authored and edited two scholarly books and numerous journal articles and book chapters. Her upcoming narrative nonfiction work 'Peshawa and the Protesters in the Dreamland' (NYU Press, 2024) merges political history with personal narrative to explore democratization in Iraqi Kurdistan through one boy's coming-of-age story.

Watts maintains active academic engagement through international conference presentations and contributions to public discourse via the Washington Post/Monkey Cage. She balances her academic career with creative writing pursuits and personal interests in Irish set dancing, dog agility training/competition, and running.