Watts studied for his
PhD at the
University of Cambridge under
Christine Carpenter, researching politics and the
English constitution during the reign of
King Henry VI, which was awarded in early 1991. He had joined
Merton College,
Oxford, the previous year as a
junior research fellow, and from there became a
lecturer at the
University of Aberystwyth. He returned to Oxford in 1997, joining
Corpus Christi College as a
fellow and
tutor in medieval history. He has described the context of his interests – Henry VI – as "a famously useless king, who came to the throne as a baby and ruled with astonishing inertness for a further thirty-nine years". In 2014 he was awarded the
Title of Distinction of Professor of Later Medieval History. At Corpus Christi College, Watts served as tutor for admissions from 1999 to 2002, senior tutor from 2008 to 2011, and vice-president from 2014 to 2017. He was chair of the
History Faculty Board (head of department) from 2018 to 2021. He also served as the chair of the editorial board of the journal
The English Historical Review between 2019 and 2022.
Research Watts' first monograph, based on his doctoral research, was published by
Cambridge University Press in 1996. According to
A. J. Pollard, reviewing the book for
The American Historical Review, Watts echoes the judgement of
K. B. McFarlane that Henry VI's "second childhood followed the first without the usual interval" and thus the guiding principle of his reign was that "he never once exercised his royal will", leaving others to act in his name. Pollard concludes that the book is a "thorough and consistent study" of late medieval constitutional politics, labelling it a "new Tory interpretation" which should be matched by a "revitalised Whig version" of constitutional history. Watts' next book was an edited collection entitled
The End of the Middle Ages? England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, published by Sutton Publishing in 1998. In her review for
The Sixteenth Century Journal,
Anne Coldiron highlighted Watts' bookending essays as "some of the best discussion of the problems of periodization" she had seen. In 2009 Watts published a survey of later medieval European history entitled
The Making of Polities as part of Cambridge University Press' Cambridge Medieval Textbooks series.
George Garnett, reviewing the work for
The English Historical Review, called it "courageous, original and thought-provoking" and "much more than a text-book" despite the title of its parent series. Though Garnett complimented Watts' "mastery of the detail of individual historical examples", he concluded that Watts' "concentration on abstract reification of structures and space" came at a cost to the book's arguments. He suggested that Watts' approach represented "the collective voice of modern French historiography", suggesting that
The Making of Polities would have benefited from immersion in academic works in other languages such as German. Garnett further concurred with another reviewer, L. C. Attreed, that Watts' book set itself apart by rejecting "the period's usual characterization of decline and crisis beloved by textbook writers", focusing instead on the development of centralized princely government.
Honours and awards In 2010 Watts was awarded a three-year major research fellowship from the
Leverhulme Trust for a project entitled 'Renaissance England, 1461–1547'. He is an elected fellow of the
Royal Historical Society.
Media work Watts has contributed reviews of late medieval history books to the
London Review of Books. ==Bibliography==