“Why is emotion the property of style? An etiology.”
Rita Copeland is the Sheli Z. and Burton X Rosenberg Professor of Humanities, Professor of Classical Studies and English at the University of Pennsylvania. She works across a number of fields and periods, including medieval literature (English, Latin, French); intellectuals, learning, and literacy in medieval Europe; literary theory from ancient to early modern; and the history of rhetoric from ancient to early modern. Her teaching combines interests in antiquity and the Middle Ages - or how the Middle Ages understood antiquity. Her newest projects are the “Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 800-1558” and a study of the emotions and rhetoric in the Middle Ages. She was a founding editor of the annual “New Medieval Literatures” and is co-editor, with Jill Ross, of Toronto Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Rhetoric, a new book series from Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.