Richard Watts is associate professor in the Department of French and Italian Studies, affiliate faculty in Comparative History of Ideas, faculty director of Canadian Studies, and co-director of the Translation Studies Hub at the University of Washington Seattle. He is the author Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World (Lexington Books, 2005), which considers the circulation of literary texts in the former French empire through the lens of cultural translation. His current project Reclaimed Waters examines how the pollution, privatization, and manufactured scarcity of water are rapidly altering its symbolic value in literature, cinema and other forms of cultural production.