Robert Watson, Ph.D.
Assistant Department Chair, Modern Languages and Literatures
Assistant Professor of Instruction
Contact
- MH 4.02.08
- robert.watson@utsa.edu
Bio
Robert Watson is a scholar of cinema, visual culture, and foodways in the French-speaking world. His research and teaching examine how cultural forms—particularly film and food—mediate questions of nation, empire, and belonging during and after decolonization. Central to his work is the concept of transnationalism, how ideas, images, and ingredients circulate along and across borders.
Dr. Watson earned his Ph.D. in French Language, Literature, and Cinema from Vanderbilt University and has taught courses in film history, French and Francophone culture, and visual media at Stetson University and SUNY Purchase. His teaching emphasizes how language, images, and everyday practices, especially eating and drinking, shape collective identities in national, diasporic, and transnational contexts.
His research focuses on the Mediterranean and Francophone worlds as interconnected spaces of colonization and decolonization, homeland and diaspora, and linguistic plurality. His publications analyze cosmopolitanism in Mediterranean cinemas, with particular attention to how minorities and diasporas are represented after decolonization.
More recent work extends these concerns to food, cuisine, and everyday cultural practice as sites of memory, circulation, and meaning. His current projects examine: 1) street food in North Africa as a form of multidirectional memory; 2) the global cultural history of wine in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, with attention to heritage, the interactions between European and indigenous grapes, and Texas’s wine boom; and 3) the symbolism of citrus in the modern Mediterranean, particularly the Jaffa orange as represented in film, cookbooks, and popular culture.
Teaching
- CSH 1213 – Mediterranean Memories
- CSH 3823 – The World of Wine: France and Beyond
- FRN 1014 – Elementary French I for Spanish Speakers
- FRN 4213 – Advanced Topics in French Culture
- MES 3113 – French New Wave Cinema
Research Interests
- Francophone studies
- Film and media studies
- Postcolonial and decolonial theory
- Cultural memory studies
- Mediterranean studies
- MENA (Middle East and North Africa) studies
- Visual culture and representation
- Food and foodways studies
- Transnational and Borderlands Studies
Degrees
- Ph.D., Vanderbilt University
- MA, University of Leeds (UK)
- BA, Baylor University
