Paul Voss

Ph.D., University of California at Riverside, 1995

Renaissance Literature, Shakespeare, the Archive

Dr. Voss primarily teaches courses on poetry and prose of the English Renaissance, Shakespeare, and Bibliography. He encourages his students to appreciate the power and beauty of language while investigating the workings of the fictive imagination. In the classroom, Dr. Voss believes that academic pursuits need not preclude literary pleasure; he asks his students to participate actively in the exploration of aesthetic, philosophical, and epistemological questions.

Dr. Voss’s many research interests revolve around primary material published in Elizabethan England. He spends considerable time thinking in and about archives. His work on the history of the book and sixteenth-century woodcut illustrations studies the tension between iconography and iconoclasm. He is also interested in recusant literature and how the Catholic imagination operated in a largely inimical environment. He recently completed a book on Elizabethan news quartos–a series of pamphlets published in England between 1589-1593. The news quartos provide the earliest evidence of serial publication, colored the writings of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Spenser, and helped define an English national identity in the final decade of Tudor England.