Dan Moss

Dan Moss is an associate professor in the English Department at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He received his B.A. from Brandeis University and his Ph.D. from Princeton University, where he was a Mellon Fellow. Specializing in late 16th-century poetry and drama, Dan’s book, The Ovidian Vogue: Literary Fashion and Imitative Practice in Late Elizabethan Poetry (Toronto, 2014), maps the wide-ranging effects of Ovid’s pre-eminence as a source for imitation by the poets and playwrights of the 1590s. His work has also appeared in Modern Philology, Critical Survey, Spenser Studies, The Spenser Review, and in edited collections. Dan's book in progress, The Play within the Plays: Shakespeare, the Chamberlain's Men, and the Continuity of Metatheater, argues that Shakespeare's professional circumstances gave rise to a systematic and continuous metatheater, which transcended the individual play and provided regular playgoers with an evolving "shadow-play" starring fictional versions of company personalities.

In addition to the usual suspects like Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, Dan’s teaching interests include Renaissance art and iconography, classical epic, the Bible as literature, and poetry of all times and places. In his free time, he is writing two lost Shakespeare plays and putting the finishing touches on The Faerie Queene.

Selected Publications

Books

• The Ovidian Vogue: Literary Fashion and Imitative Practice in Late Elizabethan England. University of Toronto Press, 2014.

Publications

• “Minor Epic” in The Oxford History of Poetry in English, vol. 4: Sixteenth Century British Poetry, ed. Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney (Oxford University Press, 2022)

• “Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the Undergraduate Classroom.” In The Sonnets: The State of Play, edited by Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, and Claire Whitehead, 251–67. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
• “The Fair Maid of Alexandria: Fragments of a Lost Shakespeare Comedy.” Critical Survey 28 (2016): 96–114.
• “‘The Second Master of Love’: George Chapman and the Shadow of Ovid.” Modern Philology 111, (2014): 457–84.
• “Spenser’s Despair and God’s Grace.” Spenser Studies 23 (2008): 73–102.

Courses Taught

• Shakespeare and the Resources of Drama (graduate seminar)
• Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Varieties of Literary Imitation (graduate seminar)
• Shakespeare and the Boys
• Renaissance Writers: Spenser and Milton
• Poetic Occasions
• A History of Metatheater in Three Acts (graduate seminar)
• The Epic Foundations of Western Literature
• Introduction to Poetry: A Poet-Guided Tour
• Shakespeare: Fathers and Daughters, Husbands and Wives

• An Introduction to Western Drama in Three Acts (and Two Interludes)