Francesca Coppa
Professor of English | Muhlenberg College
Allentown, PA, UNITED STATES
Dr. Coppa's primary field is British dramatic literature, but she is also a scholar of sexuality theory, mass media and fan cultures.
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Biography
Dr. Coppa's primary field is British drama, but she is also a scholar of sexuality theory, mass media and fan cultures. She is the foremost American expert on the playwright Joe Orton and has recently written the new introduction to the Bloomsbury edition of The Importance of Being Earnest.
Coppa has co-edited the Fan/Remix Video special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), and her current book projects are about fanfiction and user-generated video.
She is a passionate advocate of fair use and is one of the founders of The Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fan works and fan culture. She directed a series of short documentaries on vidding for MIT’s “New Media Literacy project.”
Coppa's courses include a full array of dramatic literature—Modern, Postwar, and Contemporary—as well as courses in film studies (Plays on Film, Postwar British Theatre and Film) and gender studies (Literature and Sexuality, Gay and Lesbian Literature). She also teaches an array of contemporary popular literature and culture courses including The Literary Marketplace, Genres of Popular Fiction, Literature and Mass Media, Sherlock James and Harry, and Performing Popular Culture: Onstage with Buffy The Vampire Slayer with Jim Peck. Her last senior seminar was on the Nobel Prize winning playwright Harold Pinter.
Areas of Expertise (11)
British Dramatic Literature
Sexuality Studies
Mass Media
Joe Orton
Harold Pinter
Fan works and culture
Remix culture
User-generated video
Youtube
Fair Use
Oscar Wilde
Education (3)
New York University: Ph.D., English Literature 1997
New York University: M.A., English Literature 1993
Columbia University: B.A., English Literature 1991
Media Appearances (4)
Fanfiction
The Why Factor, BBC World Service radio
2016-03-28
Francesca Coppa served as a guest for "Fanfiction" on The Why Factor, a production of BBC World Service.
Remixing Culture And Why The Art Of The Mash-Up Matters
TechCrunch online
2015-03-22
The art form known colloquially as “vidding” for example – editing found footage from TV shows and movies to music – actually dates back some 40 years and has often celebrated, what the theorist Francesca Coppa describes as, “a distinctly female way of seeing" ...
Entertainment Geekly: 'Breaking Bad,' 'Lost,' and the precarious hysteria of TV fandom
Entertainment Weekly online
2013-09-05
Francesca Coppa’s fascinating essay “A Brief History of Media Fandom” (available in the Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet) traces our contemporary idea of media fandom ...
Geek Feminism interviews the OTW’s Francesca Coppa
Geek Feminism online
2009-09-23
A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to give us your questions for an interview with Dr. Francesca Coppa, one of the founders of the Organization for Transformative Works ...
Articles (3)
Sherlock as Cyborg: Bridging Mind and Body
McFarland
2012 In The Game Is On: The Transmedia Adventures of Sherlock, eds. Busse and Stein (McFarland, 2012) p. 210 - 222.
An Editing Room of One's Own: Vidding as Women's Work
Camera Obscura
2011 Vidding is a thirty-year-old remix practice in which predominantly female media fans reedit television or film into music videos. Vidding is important not only as an art form in its own right but also as a subcultural — and often feminist — reinterpretation of and confrontation with mainstream media culture.
Teaching Melodrama, Modernity and Postmodernity in Lady Windermere's Fan
MLA Press
2008 In Approaches to Teaching Oscar Wilde, edited by Philip E. Smith for the MLA Press, 2008.
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