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Photo by REED HUTCHINSON
English Professor Robert Watson is this year's Gold Shield Prize winner. |
Spreading the power of Shakespeare
BY AJAY SINGH
Today Staff Writer
Like any good English professor, Robert Watson loves the students who practically leap out of their front-row seats with enthusiasm when he teaches Shakespeare. But Watson gets a special satisfaction when a student who spent the entire term in the back row, hiding behind what the professor calls a “who-cares face,” stops by his office months later to say how much the course meant to him or her.
“Some teachers want to emphasize how foreign and strange Shakespeare was,” Watson said. “I want students to connect with the idea that there are persistent, if not universal, aspects of human experience in Shakespeare.”
Enabling students to blossom and find meaning in Shakespeare is just one reason why Watson was recently awarded the prestigious Gold Shield Faculty Prize for 2006-2008 by Gold Shield, Alumnae of UCLA. The prize comes with a $30,000 cash award given in two annual installments.
In a partnership between the College of Letters and Science and Gold Shield, the prize has been bestowed every two years since 1986 on a faculty member — alternatively from the north and south campuses — who displays exceptional accomplishments in research, undergraduate teaching and service to the university and beyond. Starting this year, the prize will be given annually.
Known for his stimulating and transformative approach to teaching, Watson fell in love with Shakespeare when he played a minor character in “Othello” in high school. During rehearsals, Watson watched the play so many times that it became for him “a way of grasping the world,” he said, adding: “I sometimes think Shakespeare’s language is like an extra (computer) RAM chip — just having it develops a student’s intelligence.”
Little wonder that one of Watson’s major off-campus passions involves traveling to Washington, D.C., to teach Shakespeare to high school teachers as part of the “Teaching Shakespeare Institutes” series funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The idea, he explained, is to “put the microchip of Shakespeare’s language in people’s minds early on — to get teachers to get students to use Shakespeare’s language.”
Watson also serves as associate vice provost for educational innovation, a position he used this year to launch a minor in civic engagement. The program enables students to travel to Sacramento and Washington, D.C., where they perform community-based projects and then analyze and integrate their experiences back in the classroom.
During a recent Guggenheim Foundation Senior Research Fellowship, Watson finished two scholarly books that helped him earn the Gold Shield prize: a new edition of Ben Jonson’s “Volpone” and “Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance,” an environmentally conscious work that a distinguished scholar at another university described as possibly “one of the most important critical works of the early 21st century.”
Watson grew up in a house full of books in the suburbs around New York City. “I sat there and gazed at the spines of books, wondering if there was a great mystery behind each of them,” he recalled. “Fortunately, I got a career in finding out.”
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