Dr James Watts
BA, MA, PhD
Current positions
Contact
Press and media
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Research interests
My research is on imperialism in literary and media cultures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth Centuries. Using an 'Imperial Lives' methodology I am researching journalists such as Flora Shaw and Perceval Landon as well as novelists such as Flora Annie Steel and Henry Rider Haggard to explore imperial advocacy in these circles. This often also touches upon travel writing and imperial representations of empire reported within Britain.
My current focus is also considering the position of nature and landscape in victorian relationships to the land. In particular, it looks at how this was imagined and acted upon in the empire and imperial debate as spaces in the settler colonies were imaginitively and practically colonised as quintessentially British and British flora and fauna was imported into Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
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.” Women Lecturers, the British Empire, and the Manchester Geographical Society, 1884-1920
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