Philip Watts

Phil Watts received his B.A. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1982 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1991.  Before joining the faculty at Columbia he taught at the University of Pittsburgh from 1992 to 2006.  His research and teaching focus on 20th-century French literature and film and the relation between politics and aesthetics.  His first book Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals in France (1999) was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize.  Since then he has continued to study how literature and film participate in democratic formations, and he has published articles on Jean Genet, Jacques Rancière, Roland Barthes and film, Jacques Rivette and the cold war, and the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.  His current research focuses on the persistence of archaic forms in postwar French literature and film.  He is the co-editor with Gabriel Rockhill of Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics (2009).