Personal Info

E-mail: john.watts(at)ccc.ox.ac.uk
Tel: 01865 276771
Web Link: http://www.ccc.ox.ac.uk/about/fellows/watts_john.php

Academic Background:

I read History at Cambridge and remained there for my doctorate on ‘Politics and the Constitution in the Reign of Henry VI’ (1991). I was a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, before moving to a lecturing job at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and finally, in 1997, to a CUF lectureship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1997 -present).

Teaching Interests:

Undergraduate:
British and European History, 1000-1550.

Graduate:
Later medieval English politics, political ideas and political culture, c.1250-c.1500. I have supervised doctoral theses on Richard II and ideas of manhood, aristocratic parks in later medieval England, notions and practices of ‘fellowship’ and, most recently, cultural politics in 15th-century Europe.

Research Interests:

I am interested in politics and political structures in later medieval England and Europe (in the 13th to 15th centuries). Most of my published work deals with later medieval English politics and political culture, but I have recently finished a book about later medieval European politics.

Selected Publications:

John Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (1996)
John Watts (ed.), The End of the Middle Ages? England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (1998)
John Watts, ‘Looking for the State in Later Medieval England’, in Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England (2002), 243-67
John Watts, ‘The Policie in Christen Remes: Bishop Russell’s Parliamentary Sermons of 1483-84’, in Authority and Consent in Tudor England. Essays presented to C.S.L. Davies (2002), 33-59
John Watts, ‘Was there a Lancastrian Court?’, in The Lancastrian Court (2003), 253-71
John Watts, ‘Richard, duke of York (d.1460), William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk (d.1450) (and three other articles)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)
John Watts, ‘The Pressure of the Public on Later Medieval Politics’ in The Fifteenth Century. IV. Political Culture in Late Medieval Britain (2004), 159-80
John Watts, ‘Usurpation in England: a Paradox of State Growth’, in Coups d’État à la fin du Moyen Age? Aux fondements du pouvoir politique en Europe occidentale (2005), 115-30
John Watts (ed.), Power and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies (2007)
John Watts, ‘Public or Plebs: the Changing Meaning of “the Commons”, 1381-1549’, in Power and Identity in the Middle Ages (2007), 242-60