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. Dan is the 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. Current projects include an article-length essay on the early Tudor poet John Skelton and another on the first woman to publish a printed book in English under her own name, Katherine Parr.
Dan is also working on a book manuscript entitled "Making the Past: Literature and Historians in Tudor England." The argument aims to offer an account of the gradually evolving relationship between history writing and poetry over the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and to suggest 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 More, Bale, Spenser, and Shakespeare, “Making the Past” asserts 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:
Fall 2023: ENGL 113 Introduction to Poetry; ENGL 311 Dramatic Literature I: The Comic and the Tragic
Spring 2023: On leave
Fall 2022: ENGL 113 Introduction to Poetry; ENGL 311 Dramatic Literature I: The Comic and the Tragic; ENGL 400 Capstone in English
Selected Publications:
“John Skelton, The Bowge of Court (1499?).” Handbook of English Renaissance Literature, ed. Ingo Berensmeyer. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2019, 225-43.
"Redeeming the Sonnet Sequence: Desire and Repentance in Fulke Greville's Caelica," Sidney Journal 35 (2017): 141-163.
“Shakespeare and History Writing,” Literature Compass 14 (2017) e12376, 1-10, doi: 10.111/lic3.12376.
Internet Resources:
Literature Compass: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1741-4113