Dr James Watts

My research is on British imperialism in literary and media cultures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I am also a public historian with interests in creative research and collaborative practice. 

I have worked on 'imperial lives' and imperial travel, especially in the late nineteenth century. Debates around imperial emigration and Land Reform has also very much been part of this and two of my articles have considered this - one through the Colonial Editor of The Times, Flora Shaw/Lugard and one through the adventure novelist and agricultural campaigner Henry Rider Haggard. 

I have also worked on imperial statues. Some of this has focused on teh memory of Edward Colston and debates around his position in Bristol. I have also published on Robert Clive and the debates centring around Lord Curzon about his statue which still stands in front of the Foreign Office. 

I think of my research as intersecting between British, imperial, and landscape histories.