Francesca Coppa
Francesca Coppa (born March 26, 1970) is an American scholar who studies British drama, performance, and fan culture. She is known for her work on Joe Orton, a British writer, editor, and dramatist. Coppa edited several of Orton’s early works for their first publication in 1998–99, long after his murder, and she published Joe Orton: A Casebook in 2003. She has also written on Oscar Wilde.
In fan studies, Coppa documents the history of media fandom and especially fanvids—fan-made videos that use music to present a point of view. She co-founded the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) in 2007, helped develop the idea of studying fan fiction as performance, and in 2017 published the first collection of fan fiction designed for teaching. As of 2021, she is a professor of English at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Coppa grew up in Brooklyn and earned a BA from Columbia College in 1991, an MA in English from New York University in 1993, and a PhD from NYU in 1997 under Una Chaudhuri. Her PhD thesis was titled "Blood and aphorism: Joe Orton, theatre, and the new aristocracy in Great Britain."
Her Joe Orton work began around 1994, using an archive at Boston University and material Orton’s sister kept at home. She edited and published Orton’s plays Fred and Madge (written 1959) and The Visitors (1961) for the first time in 1998, and Between Us Girls (a 1957 diary-style novel) in the same year, with a long introduction. She later edited two more short novels, Lord Cucumber and The Boy Hairdresser, in 1999. In 2003 she published Joe Orton: A Casebook, a collection of essays about his work and life. Reviewers called the book a valuable resource.
Coppa has also written about Wilde, including a 2010 survey of Wilde’s representations in twentieth-century plays, an introduction to The Importance of Being Earnest (2015), and writing on teaching Lady Windermere’s Fan. She has published on Harold Pinter’s early plays and on queer sexuality in Brideshead Revisited.
She co-edited a book about stage magic, Performing Magic on the Western Stage (2008), and co-founded OTW in 2007 with Naomi Novik and others. The organization works to preserve fan works and address copyright issues, and Coppa served on its board until 2012 and remains an emeritus director. The scholar Henry Jenkins notes her work challenging intellectual property rules as applied to fanworks. Coppa is especially known for her work on fanvids, which she describes as “a visual essay” that uses music to help viewers see the source material differently.
In 2012 Coppa co-edited a Transformative Works and Cultures issue on Fan/Remix Video. Her research on fan fiction, beginning with a 2006 paper, uses performance theory to argue that fans write in dramatic, performative ways and should be assessed by performative criteria, not just literary ones. In 2017 she edited The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age, a teaching-focused collection of fan fiction published by University of Michigan Press. She says the book shows that fanfiction is legal, a transformative fair use, and a form of art. The collection has been praised for being accessible and useful in teaching, though some reviewers note its Western focus. It won the 2018 Prose Award in the Media and Cultural Studies category.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 19:36 (CET).