Faculty Profile: Dan Mosser
Dan Mosser Appointed Leverhulme Professor at The University of York, UK
Dan Mosser, Professor of English, has been appointed as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at The University of York in the United Kingdom for the fall semesters of 2006 and 2007. While at York, Professor Mosser will teach and research in the university’s Centre for Medieval Studies.
Leverhulme Visiting Professorships are granted by the Leverhulme Trust on a highly competitive basis to “host an internationally distinguished academic from overseas in order to enhance the research skills and work of the host institution.” The host institution nominates and invites the professor.
The Centre for Medieval Studies was founded in 1968 in order to promote interdisciplinary research into the Middle Ages, and it is now one of the most successful teaching institutions in this field anywhere in the world. Its staff are drawn from archeology, art history, English and related literature, and history.
While at York, Professor Mosser will give a series of lectures at the University of York, Queens University (Belfast), Glasgow University, and the University of Birmingham. He will carry out collaborative research with Professor Linne Mooney, who in 2005 electrified the world of Chaucer studies by identifying the target of Chaucer’s “To Adam, His Owne Scriveyn” (a poem that curses scribe Adam’s carelessness) as Adam Pinkhurst, the scribe of the two most important manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales and the scribe of “The Petition of the Folk of Mercerye”—the petition of the Mercer’s Company to impeach the Mayor of London (www.huntington.org/Information/frontiers/S06scribe.htm). Mooney and Mosser will attempt to identify more scribes, work that will contribute to Mosser’s Digital Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Pre-1500 Editions of the Canterbury Tales (now nearing completion) and Mooney’s book and database on fifteenth-century scribes. They plan to publish a series of co-authored articles on their collaborations. Mosser will also give some lectures in graduate seminars on Chaucer, Book History, and Manuscript Studies.
While Mosser and Mooney are both known for their work in paleography (the study of “old writing”) and “codicology” (the study of the codex, or manuscript book), Mosser adds expertise in paper history (watermarks and book structures) and Middle English Dialectology to their collaboration.
At Virginia Tech, Professor Mosser specializes in the material structures of the manuscripts and pre-1500 editions of the Canterbury Tales and the relationship of those structures to their presentation of the text. The methodologies he employs in this work are known as codicology and bibliography. He publishes descriptions of these “witnesses” to the Canterbury Tales in association with the Canterbury Tales Project (http://www.canterburytalesproject.org/), on CD-ROM and the internet. An offshoot of this work is his interest in watermarks. He is involved in a large, ongoing project in collaboration with Ernest Sullivan and Len Hatfield: The Thomas L. Gravell Watermark Archive and Database (www.gravell.org). He teaches courses in Medieval Literature, History of the Language, and Digital Humanities.