British Academy elects Michael Watts as Corresponding Fellow

Professor Michael Watts, who graduated from UCL Geography in 1972, has been elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Michael gained his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1979, later published as Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria, a pioneering work in political ecology.

He then joined the Geography Department at the University of California, Berkeley, serving from 1994 to 2004 as Director of the Institute of International Studies.

In recent years, he has continued to work in Nigeria on the political ecology of oil and the effect of oil exploitation on the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta. He has also explored issues of global agriculture and food availability, gender and households, irrigation politics, and Islam.

See

• Vimeo presentation
• More extended account of Michael’s recent research
• Michael Watts (Department of Geography at Berkeley)