Rate My Professor Rita Copeland

Rita Copeland is the Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Classical Studies, English, and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research specializations encompass medieval literature in English, Latin, and French; literary theory from ancient to early modern periods; the history of rhetoric from ancient to early modern; reception of classical traditions in medieval and early modern Europe; intellectuals, learning, and literacy in medieval Europe; history of the emotions; representations of the intellectual in pre-modern Europe; commentary and gloss; and Aristotle's Rhetoric in medieval England. Copeland has authored and edited numerous influential works, including Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991; reprinted 1995), Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1996), Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning (Cambridge, 2001), Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475 (with Ineke Sluiter, Oxford, 2009), The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (edited with Peter Struck, Cambridge, 2010), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Volume 1: 800-1558 (edited, Oxford, 2016), and Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2020). She is the founding editor of the annual New Medieval Literatures, general editor with Peter Mack of the Cambridge History of Rhetoric (five volumes, forthcoming 2027), and co-editor with Jill Ross of Toronto Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Rhetoric.

Copeland's contributions to medieval studies have earned her prestigious honors, including the 2025 Haskins Medal from the Medieval Academy of America for Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, recognized as the field's most distinguished book award; the 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship; the 2018 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching; the 2013 Provost's Award for Outstanding Mentorship of Ph.D. Students; and the 2011 David Delaura Teaching Award. She has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem (2010), Penn's Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (2013), and the Warburg Institute in London (2020). Her work bridges antiquity and the Middle Ages, illuminating how medieval cultures interpreted classical antiquity, and has significantly shaped scholarship on rhetoric, pedagogy, and intellectual history in pre-modern Europe.