Robert Watson

Distinguished Professor of English

Robert N. Watson (BA Yale summa cum laude; PhD Stanford, Highest Honors) came to UCLA from Harvard in 1986. He has served as Chair of the English Department, Chair of the Faculty of the College of Letters and Science, Associate Vice-Provost for Educational Innovation, and Associate Dean of Humanities. He has won Guggenheim, NEH, and ACLS Fellowships, spent terms as a fellow at Cambridge and Oxford, been awarded UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching and Gold Shield prizes, and been chosen as the first holder of the Neikirk Chair for Innovative Undergraduate Education.

Professor Watson’s ecocritical book Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance won prizes as both the year’s best book in Early Modern studies and best book of environmentalist criticism. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker and dozens of other journals, and as a chapbook and a collection. Along with scholarly editions, his other books have explored ambition in Shakespeare, Ben Jonson’s comedies, the fear of death in the Renaissance, the malfunctions of cultural evolution, and Kurosawa’s film adaptation of Macbeth. His new book for general intellectual audiences, Shakespeare’s Tragedies: What Makes Them Great, was recently published by Stanford University Press.

Rethinking Shakespeare's Othello: New Perspectives and Insights

Professor Robert N. Watson explores Shakespeare’s Othello through several overlooked perspectives, including Othello’s anxieties about masculinity, the religious tensions of Shakespeare’s England that magnify the question of whether love (earthly or divine) must be earned, and Othello’s use of code-switching to navigate his social position (which allows Shakespeare to offer vocabulary lessons). Finally, a close reading of Act 4, Scene 3 reveals lost insights into race, slavery, and the heroine Desdemona’s full humanity. 

New to Shakespeare’s Othello? Read a brief synopsis of the plot and key themes relevant to the lecture.