PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

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 Pennsylvnia. 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.