Nicole F. Watts

Nicole F. Watts is a writer and a professor in the San Francisco State University Dept of Political Science. She specializes in comparative politics, narrative nonfiction writing, social movements, nationalism, and politics of the Middle East and North Africa. She's also a writer, traveler, Irish set dancer, ex-newspaper reporter, dog agility trainer/competitor, hiker, and plodding but committed runner. Her work of narrative nonfiction, Republic of Dreams: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Struggles, and the Future of Iraqi Kurdistan, was published by New York University Press in January of 2025. She is the author of Activists in Office: Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey and co-editor of Negotiating Political Power in Turkey: Breaking up the Party.