Assistant Professor
Heritage Hall 360
(205) 934-5634
Office Hours: T/Th 12:30 - 2 p.m.
Research and Teaching Interests: Early Modern Britain and its empire, the Atlantic world, the American Revolution, politics and democracy, print culture
Education:
- B.A., Yale University
- M.Phil., University of Cambridge
- Ph.D., Yale University
Amy Watson’s research examines the political history of the early modern British Empire. Her first book, Patriots Before Revolution: The Rise of Party Politics in the British Atlantic, 1714-1763 (Yale University Press, 2025), traces the British origins of the Patriot party, which later inspired the American Revolution. It argues that the early Patriots’ ideological mission was not American independence but, rather, imperial reform: Patriots sought to create a British Empire that was militant, expansionist, confederal, and free. She has also published in The William and Mary Quarterly and The Scottish Historical Review.
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Select Publications
- Patriots Before Revolution: The Rise of Party Politics in the British Atlantic, 1714-1763 (Yale University Press, 2025).
- “The New York Patriot Movement: Partisanship, the Free Press, and Britain’s Imperial Constitution, 1731-1739,” The William and Mary Quarterly 77, No. 1 (January 2020): 33-64.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.77.1.0033 - “Patriotism and Partisanship in Post-Union Scotland, 1724-1737,” The Scottish Historical Review 97, No. 1 (April 2018): 57-84.
https://doi.org/10.3366/shr.2018.0353 - Steven Pincus and Amy Watson, “Patriotism after the Hanoverian Succession,” in The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and its Empire, edited by Brent Sirota and Allan MacInnes, (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2019): 155-174.