Email: matthew.g.watson@warwick.ac.uk
Room: D1.06, Social Science Building

 

 

ADVICE AND FEEDBACK HOURS, 2024/2025

My Advice and Feedback Hours in teaching weeks during Terms 1 and 2 are on Monday 12.30-13.30 and Monday 16.30-17.30. These times have been chosen specifically to coordinate with when I know my students will be on campus. However, if you really cannot make either of them in any given week, please email me and I will see whether it is possible to make alternative arrangements.

 

 

ACADEMIC PRESENTATIONS

My project website also contains information about all the academic presentationsLink opens in a new window I have delivered since October 2013. Many are accompanied either by a recording of the presentation or a copy of the paper to which I was speaking. I have been lucky enough to have been invited to speak in some wonderful placesLink opens in a new window about my 'Rethinking the Market' project.

 

 

BLOG POSTS AND PODCASTS

Please take a look at the various blog posts I have written and podcasts I have been interviewed forLink opens in a new window over the past ten years. Some allowed me to simply say how I looked at the world, whereas others asked me to make predictions about how it was changing. How well did I do?

 

 

About Me

I am Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics and International Studies. I am also Department REF Lead and Department Director of Academic Staff Development. I came to Warwick in January 2007 from the University of Birmingham, where I had been a full-time member of academic staff since October 1999, and where before that I had studied for my PhD. From October 2013 to February 2019 I was an Economic and Social Research Council Professorial Fellow engaged on the project, 'Rethinking the Market'. Its stand-alone websiteLink opens in a new window contains details of all of my project-related activities. The funding on the grant might now have elapsed some time ago, but the ideas on which the project was founded certainly live on. Indeed, they have now expanded in so many different directions that I could feasibly be exploring them for the whole of the rest of my career.

 

 

Research Interests

My research interests are concentrated at the intersection of the broad areas of political economy and the history of thought. I have a particular concern for trying to understand politically that most ubiquitous of modern economic institutions, 'the market'. What does it mean to live life as a market-bound economic agent; how has that agency been culturally inscribed in modern history; and what plausible political means are there to escape its behavioural logics? My overall programme of research is designed to allow me to understand the multiple ways in which the market economy becomes embedded in everyday experience: as a set of institutions designed to naturalise behaviour; as an ideological blueprint for the common sense of society; as formal practices manifesting routinely reproduced exchange relations; as evolving ideas incorporated into the history of economic thought; as reflections in popular culture; and as something to organise political resistance against. Every piece that appears on my research CV speaks directly to one aspect or more of this broader programme. It also reflects the key to understanding what unites the individual elements of my outreach, public engagement and impact work.

My most recent book exploring such themes was published in the summer of 2024 and is called False Prophets of Economics Imperialism: The Limits of Mathematical Market Models. It follows in the same vein as my earlier books: The Market (2018); Uneconomic Economics and the Crisis of the Model World (2014); The Political Economy of International Capital Mobility (2007); and Foundations of International Political Economy (2005).

 

 

PhD Supervision and Postdoctoral Mentoring

As of September 2024, I have supervised thirty-eight PhD students to completion, all successfully, with a further six currently under supervision. All of them have worked or are working in the broad areas of political economy and/or the history of thought, and they have research interests which intersect my own in important ways. I have also had responsibility during my career for mentoring twenty Postdoctoral Fellows. Every one of these people who have graduated from their Early Career Researcher programme have moved successfully into further academic roles or are in a job of their choice outside of academia.

I remain keen to talk to potential PhD students and postdoctoral fellows whose research interests complement my Professorial Fellowship project, 'Rethinking the Market'. Details of my project teamLink opens in a new window are available from my accompanying website so that you can learn more about the exciting work the members of that team are undertaking. It will also enable you to see whether your proposed research is a good fit with theirs and, as such, a good fit with mine too. Please do only ask me about possible PhD supervision or postdoctoral mentoring if there is a genuine overlap between your research interests and my published work. Each year I get inundated with general requests about whether I will supervise PhDs or mentor postdoctoral projects well beyond my areas of expertise, but I am afraid that my answer in these circumstances always has to be 'no'.