The W. John Bennett Distinguished Visitorship

A programme designed to bring senior international scholars to Toronto to play an active role in the academic life of the Institute

History of the Visitorship Programme

In 2010, the Institute, with a grant from the Bickell Foundation and in collaboration with the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies, established a Distinguished Visiting Scholar programme designed to bring senior international scholars to PIMS and Toronto during their academic leave or sabbatical year. The Visitor is asked to give a public lecture, attend Institute post-doctoral seminars where appropriate, consult with graduate students, and play an active role in the academic life of the Institute while pursuing his or her own research.

The Visitorship was endowed through the generosity of Mr W. John Bennett of Montreal, and the first appointment was made in 2010. The Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of Toronto, through the generosity of the University’s former chancellor, the Hon. H.N.R. Jackman, has since provided an equal endowment in support of the Visiting Scholars Programme. These gifts have been recognized through the naming of the W. John Bennett Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies and the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto.

The Current Distinguished Visiting Scholar

Rita Copeland is Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her publications include Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1991); Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1996); Pedagogy, Intellectuals and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge 2001); Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric:  Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475 (with I. Sluiter; Oxford, 2009); The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (with P. Struck; 2010), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, 800-1558 (2016), and most recently, Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2021), winner of the 2025 Haskins Medal. She was a co-founder of the journal New Medieval Literatures. She is General Editor (with the late Peter Mack) of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Rhetoric in five volumes. She has been the recipient of NEH, ACLS, American Philosophical Society, and Guggenheim fellowships. She is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.  She has been a visiting professor at Hebrew University, University of Iceland, and University of Oxford, and a visiting fellow at the Warburg Institute, London.

W. John Bennett Distinguished Visiting Scholars from Past Years

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