Richard Watts

Richard Watts is associate professor of French in the Department of French and Italian Studies, co-creator of the Environments, Cultures, and Values minor, and founding director of the Translation Studies Hub at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World, a history of the colonial framing of literatures from the French Empire and the decolonial movements that gave those literatures their autonomy. His current research lies at the intersection of francophone postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities. He is currently completing a book project titled Reclaimed Waters: Literary History, Translation, and Resource Decolonization in the Francophone Post/colonial World that considers how the pollution, privatization, and manufactured scarcity of water are rapidly altering its symbolic value in literature, cinema and other forms of cultural production in the francosphere. This research project also takes form in several documentary films he has made: mARTinique: Art in a Poisoned Land (2023), Repair the World: Oumar Ball in Conversation with Abderrahmane Sissako (w/Danny Hoffman, 2023), and Tambass: Life in Spite of it All (w/Maureen Ryan, Meghan Halabisky, and Danny Hoffman, forthcoming 2025). A future project titled Scenes of Translation: Translators and Interpreters in the Migrant Texts of the Francosphere considers the representation of multilinguals who are not only mediators that help people who crossing cultural, linguistic, and national boundaries, but symptoms of an increasingly collective condition in which political violence, environmental change, and economic disparity lead to mass, often forced, displacement.