Dan Breen

Ph.D. Duke University (2006)

M.A. Yale University (1999)

B.A. University of Connecticut (1998)

Dan Breen studies late medieval and early modern writing and is particularly interested in the literature and historiography of the English Reformations; church history in England and in Western Europe between 1400 and 1700; Shakespeare; and the medieval chronicle. He joined the English Department at Ithaca College in 2005, and teaches surveys of Shakespeare and of English Renaissance literature, as well as genre courses on poetry and drama. With Professor Wendy Hyman, he is co-organizer of the Ithaca College Medieval and Renaissance Studies Colloquium, an interdisciplinary faculty seminar that meets once a month to discuss and present research on the history, literature, and culture of the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. Dan is currently working on two article-length essays: one on the appearance of angels in Heywood's If You Know Not Me You Know No Body and in Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII, and another on sixteenth-century debates about the historiographical value of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. He is also revising his dissertation, “Making the Past: History, Historians, and Literature in England, 1485-1600,” into a book manuscript.

“Making the Past” examines the gradually evolving relationship between history writing and poetry over the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and argues that the term “historian” begins to develop coherence as a discrete authorial identity in part because of the ways in which writers of histories are constructed and represented in poetic and “fictional” texts. In discussions of Skelton, More, Bale, and Sidney, “Making the Past” suggests that literature and historiography played active parts in shaping Tudor political and confessional conflicts, and that these conflicts in turn helped shape the ways in which poets and historians understood their work.

Courses:

For full syllabi, please see the "Documents" link above.

Spring 2009: Honors Intermediate Seminar: "Self and Self-Love in Literature and Culture"; "Dramatic Literature I: The Comic and the Tragic"

Fall 2008: "Shakespeare and the Monarchy"; "Dramatic Literature I: The Comic and the Tragic"

Selected Publications:

"Thomas More's History of Richard III: Genre, Humanism, and Moral Education," Studies in Philology 107.4 (forthcoming 2010).

“The Resurrected Corpus: History and Reform in Bale’s Kynge Johan.” In Renaissance Retrospections: Tudor Views of the Middle Ages, ed. Sarah Kelen. Kalamazoo (MI): Western Michigan University Press (forthcoming).

Survey Article, "Literary Criticism and the Experience of Religious Belief in Sixteenth-Century England," (accepted by Sixteenth Century Journal)

“Early Modern Historiography,” Literature Compass 2 (2005) RE 136, 1-14, http://www.literature-compass.com/viewpoint.asp?section=2&ref=488.

--http://www.literature-compass.com