Background
Raised between Bath and Bristol in the UK, Watts received his bachelor's degree in geography and economics from University College London 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 as 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. He has supervised 75 PhD students and post-docs. He retires from Berkeley in 2013.
Watts was named a 2003 Guggenheim fellow for his research on oil politics in Nigeria, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (2004), and the Smuts Lecturer at Cambridge University in 2007. In 2004 he was awarded the Victoria Medal of the Royal Geographical Society.
On July 25, 2007, he was shot in the hand in Port Harcourt, Nigeria by unknown gunmen.
Watts is married to Mary Beth Pudup, who is a UC Santa Cruz faculty member, and has two children. He is a member of Retort collective, a Bay Area-based collective of radical intellectuals, with whom he authored the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, published by Verso Books.
He is also on the advisory board of FFIPP-USA (Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace-USA), a network of Palestinian, Israeli, and International faculty, and students, working in for an end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and just peace.
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