We report on controlling the spontaneous emission (SE) rate of a molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) monolayer coupled with a planar photonic crystal (PPC) nanocavity. Spatially resolved photoluminescence (PL) mapping shows strong variations of emission when the MoS2 monolayer is on the PPC cavity, on the PPC lattice, on the air gap, and on the unpatterned gallium phosphide substrate.Polarization dependences of the cavity-coupled MoS2 emission show a more than 5 times stronger extracted PL intensity than the un-coupled emission, which indicates an underlying cavity mode Purcell enhancement of MoS2 SE rate exceeding a factor of 70.The recent finding that a single atomic layer of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) can exhibit a large, direct bandgap [1-4] opens the possibility of a new range of atomically thin materials for electronic and electro-optic devices.Monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS 2 ) has been used to fabricate field-effect transistors (FETs) with a carriermobility of 200 cm 2 V −1 s −1 and On/Off ratios exceeding 10 8 at room temperature, comparable to those obtained in graphene nanoribbon-based FETs [5]. Optical studies have shown that monolayer MoS 2 exhibits a photoluminescence (PL) quantum yield that is enhanced by a factor more than 10 4 compared with the bulk crystal [2,6]. However, the PL efficiency of monolayer MoS 2 is still very low at ∼ 10 −2 because the nonradiative recombination rate 1/τ nr far exceeds