Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (U. Penn Press, 2006; paperback, 2007: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14213.html).

Editor, Volpone, by Ben Jonson, New Mermaids Series (A&C Black and Norton, 2003).

Editor, Every Man in His Humour, by Ben Jonson, New Mermaids Series (1998)

Editor, Critical Essays on Ben Jonson (G.K. Hall/Twayne/Macmillan Presses, 1997)

The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (U. California Press, 1987; paperback, 1999)

Ben Jonson's Parodic Strategy: Literary Imperialism in the Comedies (Harvard UP, 1987)

Shakespeare and the Hazards of Ambition (Harvard UP, 1984); Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Prize.

“The English Renaissance: Nature and Culture,” forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, Oxford University Press. “Shakespeare’s Neologisms,” forthcoming in Shakespeare Survey. “Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Ecology of Human Being,” forthcoming in Ecocritical Shakespeare, Ashgate. “The Humanities Really Do Produce a Profit,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 21, 2010. “Coining Words on the Elizabethan and Jacobean Stage,” Philological Quarterly 88 (2009). “Death,” in the Shakespeare Encyclopedia (Greenwood). “Teaching ‘Crying’: Lot 49 and the 1960s,” in Approaches to Teaching Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49” and Other Works, Modern Language Association. “Wherefore Art Thou Tereu?: Juliet and the Legacy of Rape,” co-authored with Stephen Dickey, Renaissance Quarterly 58. “As You Liken It: Simile in the Wilderness,” Shakespeare Survey 56. "Tragedy," revised, in The Cambridge Companion to Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, 2^nd edition (Cambridge UP, 2003). “Tragedies of Revenge and Ambition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy, (Cambridge UP, 2002). “Othello as Reformation Tragedy,” in In the Company of Shakespeare (Fairleigh Dickinson UP). “`’Tis But A Man Gone’: Iago as Serial Killer,” Shakespeare Magazine, 1999. "The Palm as the End of the Mind," PMLA, 1992. "Giving Up the Ghost in a World of Decay: Hamlet, Revenge, and Denial," Renaissance Drama, 1991. "False Immortality in Measure for Measure: Comic Means, Tragic Ends," Shakespeare Quarterly, 1990. "Richard III" in Shakespearean Criticism, Vol. 8, Gale Research, 1990. "Teaching 'Shakespeare': Theory vs. Practice" in Teaching Literature: What is Needed Now (Harvard UP, 1988). "'Thriftless Ambition,' Foolish Wishes, and the Tragedy of Macbeth," in William Shakespeare's Macbeth: Modern Critical Interpretations, Chelsea House, 1987). "The Alchemist and Jonson's Conversion of Comedy," in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation (Harvard UP, 1986). "The Henry IV Plays," in Henry the Fourth Parts I and II: Critical Essays (Garland, 1986).  "Horsemanship in Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy," English Literary Renaissance, 1983.

Professor Watson received his B.A. summa cum laude from Yale in 1975 and his Ph.D. with Highest Honors from Stanford in 1979, then spent six years as a professor at Harvard before coming to UCLA in 1986, where he has served as Chair of the Department of English, Chair of the Faculty of the UCLA College of Letters and Science, and Associate Vice-Provost for Educational Innovation. He has won national senior research fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as a UC President’s Fellowship.

Professor Watson teaches mostly Shakespeare, English Renaissance poetry, and historical ecocriticism, although he also created and led a new interdisciplinary General Education course on the 1960s. For seven years he served as Head Scholar of the Teaching Shakespeare Summer Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.. In 2001, he received the annual UCLA Distinguished Teaching Prize, and from 2006-8 he held the Gold Shield prize, given to one faculty member at the university for outstanding contributions in research, teaching, and public service.

His latest book, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance, won the 2007 Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Prize,“awarded annually for the best book published in early modern studies,” as well as the ASLE Prize for the best book of ecocriticism of 2005-07. He continues to study Renaissance environmentalism, and has recently published poetry in the New Yorker and other literary journals.