
Dr James Watts
BA, MA, PhD
Current positions
Contact
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Research interests
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.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
The Women that made Barton Hill
Principal Investigator
Description
This project is a collaboration between Barton Hill History Group, Special Collections at the University of Bristol, and Bristol Archives and is funded by the Brigstow Institute.
It seeks…Managing organisational unit
Department of History (Historical Studies)Dates
10/05/2024 to 09/05/2025
Publications
Recent publications
08/02/2024Contested Statues
Journal of British Studies
“Carrying with her a most influential and intelligent audience.”
Northwest Geography
Land Reform, Henry Rider Haggard, and the Politics of Imperial Settlement, 1900–1920
Historical Journal
A Great, Big, Happy (white) Family? Utopian Dreams of Anglo-American Unity
Journal of Victorian Culture
Terrifying and Powerful, Fertile and Homely: Flora Shaw and ‘England’ in Representations of the Imperial Landscape, 1890–1904
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
Thesis
Imperial Enthusiasts and the Presentation of Empire in Britain
Supervisors
Award date
26/11/2020