John Watts (historian)

Professor John Watts FRHistS
Born	John Lovett Watts (1964-09-29) 29 September 1964 Middlesex, England
Title	Professor of Later Medieval History
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Thesis	Domestic Politics and the Constitution in the Reign of Henry VI, c. 1435–61 (1991)
Doctoral advisor	Christine Carpenter
Academic work
Discipline	History
Sub-discipline	Late-medieval English history intellectual history political history
Institutions	Merton College, Oxford Aberystwyth University Corpus Christi College, Oxford

John Lovett Watts FRHistS (born 1964) is an English historian specialising in the political history of late-medieval England. Born on 29 September 1964, he studied for his PhD 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". He is now professor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

At Corpus Christi College, Watts served as Tutor for Admissions from 1999-2002, Senior Tutor from 2008-2011, and Vice-President from 2014-2017. He was Chair of the History Faculty Board (Head of Department) from 2018 to 2021.

Bibliography

• Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (1996)
• The End of the Middle Ages? England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (1998) (editor)
• Power and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies (2007) (co-editor with Huw Pryce)
• The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300-1500 (2009)
• Political Society in Later Medieval England: A Festschrift for Christine Carpenter (2011) (co-editor with Benjamin Thompson)
• Government and Political Life in England and France, c.1300-c.1500 (2015) (co-editor with Christopher Fletcher and Jean-Philippe Genet)
• History of Universities: Volume XXXII / 1-2: Renaissance College, Corpus Christie College, Oxford; 1450-1600, Volume 32 (2019) (co-editor with Mordechai Feingold)