Reading the Book of Nature

Availability of Data and Resources
My research project on the life and work of May Watts presents a unique opportunity to
take advantage of an excellent local archival source: the Sterling Morton Library at the Morton
Arboretum, one of the best natural history libraries in the Midwest, has her personal papers in its
archive, as well as a deep collection in ecology, natural history, botany, and local history. These
resources are fully available to me as a professional scholar through arrangements I have
confirmed with the Morton Library. Also available through Arboretum staff and records is
information on former students of Watts, some of whom are still alive and potentially available
for interviews for my planned biographical research on Watts.
Relationship of Work to Developments in the Field
Two major areas of research and writing intersect within my proposed project: ecological
criticism, or "ecocriticism"; and the history, literature, and natural history of Chicago. Until quite
recently, ecocritical scholarship has concentrated largely on writers, literary genres, and themes
grounded in remote and rural settings, as opposed to critiquing writers and texts associated with
urban themes and city landscapes. (For a brief definition of ecocriticism, see the Research
Design and Analytic Methods section below.) In this fashion, since its inception in the late 1980s
and early 1990s as a self-described "green" method of literary and cultural criticism, ecocriticism
has displayed a bias against the urban sphere, though more by benign neglect than conscious
prejudice. In the process, ecocriticism lent credence to that age-old opposition of nature and
culture by implicitly defining wilderness as, among other things, that-which-is-not-urban.
Recently, though, there has been a slight shift in the winds. For example, critic Michael
Bennett argues for an increased emphasis on urban themes and environments in his 2001 essay,
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