Richard Watts has research and teaching interests in the post/colonial francophone world. He is the author of Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World (Lexington Books, 2005), which considers how the presentation of books – their covers, illustrations, dedications, and, most significantly, prefaces – allowed them to pass from the post/colonial space of their production to the largely metropolitan French space of their consumption. Written at the intersection of postcolonial studies and ecocriticism, his current project, tentatively titled Water Narratives: Imagining Global Environmental Change in the Francophone Post/colonial World, examines how the pollution, privatization, and manufactured scarcity of water are rapidly altering its previously stable symbolic value in literature, cinema and other forms of cultural production. He has published on these and other subjects in Modern Language Notes, Research in African Literatures, Traducation-Terminologie-Rédaction, French Forum, and Sites. He was a research fellow at the University of Washington Simpson Center for the Humanities in 2009-2010 and had a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Winter 2010.