Rita Copeland

I work across a number of fields and periods, including: medieval literature (English, Latin, French); literary theory from ancient to modern; the history of rhetoric; the reception of classical traditions in medieval and early modern Europe; intellectuals, learning, and literacy in medieval Europe; history of the emotions. Usually my teaching combines my interests in antiquity and the Middle Ages--or how the Middle Ages understood antiquity.  I recently published The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature vol. 1, 800-1558 (2016).   Other recent work includes essays on commentary and gloss, and on Aristotle's Rhetoric in medieval England.  My current project is a book on emotion and the history of rhetoric.  I am also interested in representations of the intellectual in pre-modern Europe, from late antique rhetorical culture to late medieval university cultures and heretical communities.   Other work includes Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric:  Language Arts and Literary Theory AD 300-1475, co-authored with Ineke Sluiter;and The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, co-edited with Peter Struck.  I was a founding editor of the annual New Medieval Literatures ).  I am General Editor, with Peter Mack (Warwick), of the Cambridge History of Rhetoric, a series in five volumes to be published in 2023.  I am also co-editor, with Jill Ross, of Toronto Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Rhetoric, a new book series from Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.  In fall, 2010, I was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, working in the research group Encountering Scripture, on medieval Christian, Jewish, and Islamic approaches to scriptural exegesis.  In Spring 2013 I was a Fellow at Penn's Center for Advanced Judaic Studies for a seminar year on innovations in the thirteenth century.  In Spring 2020 I was a Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute in London.

Recent graduate courses that I have taught include: Medieval Poetics; Boethius: from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period; The Matter of Thebes (on medieval and early modern reception of Statius' Thebaid); Gloss and Commentary; The Classics and Middle English Literature; Medieval Education; The Sophists:  Ancient Traditions and Post-Classical Receptions (co-taught with Ralph Rosen); Introduction to Literary Theory (Comparative Literature); Medieval Allegory; Premodern Rhetorics; Piers Plowman; Chaucer's Classicism.  Undergraduate courses that I teach include: History of Literary Theory (Ancient to Modern); Ancient and Medieval Epic; The Romance of Pagan Antiquity; Troy Stories; Emotions.