Francesca Coppa (born March 26, 1970) is an American scholar whose research has encompassed British drama, performance studies and fan studies. In English literature, she is known for her work on the British writer Joe Orton; she edited several of his early novels and plays for their first publication in 1998–99, more than thirty years after his murder, and compiled an essay collection, Joe Orton: A Casebook (2003). She has also published on Oscar Wilde. In the fan-studies field, Coppa is known for documenting the history of media fandom and, in particular, of fanvids, a type of fan-made video. She co-founded the Organization for Transformative Works in 2007, originated the idea of interpreting fan fiction as performance, and in 2017, published the first collection of fan fiction designed for teaching purposes. As of 2021, Coppa is a professor of English at Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania.
Biography
Coppa comes from Brooklyn. She gained her BA from Columbia College, Columbia University (1991), and her MA in English literature from New York University (1993). Her PhD (1997), also from New York University, was supervised by Una Chaudhuri; her thesis is entitled "Blood and aphorism: Joe Orton, theatre, and the new aristocracy in Great Britain".
As of 2021, she is a professor of English and director of women's and gender studies at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where she was previously the director of film studies. Her current research interests include British drama, sexuality theory, and media, performance and fan studies.
Research and writings
Joe Orton
Coppa is known for her work on Joe Orton, a British playwright and novelist who came to prominence in 1963 and whose career was cut short by his murder by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, in 1967. She started to research Orton formally in 1994, based on an archive of materials at Boston University, as well as papers that she found Orton's sister had been keeping at home in a cardboard box. Coppa says that Orton's writings have "challenged and delighted me", citing "the perfection of his word choice, his almost-tangible glee at his own inventiveness, the dead-on rightness of his social anger, his confident assertion of sexual desire." She highlights the rapid pace of social change during his brief career, and states that the "many contradictions" of a man who was "young, working-class, intellectual, homosexual, and 'macho' all at the same time" render Orton "an almost irresistible symbol."
Many of Orton's early works had never been published, and Coppa edited two of his plays – Fred and Madge (written in 1959) and The Visitors (1961) – for first publication in 1998. In the same year, she edited for first publication his earliest solo novel, Between Us Girls, a parody in diary format written in 1957, and contributed a thirty-page introduction covering his life and career, described by Elaine Showalter as "excellent" and William Hutchings as "useful". Coppa recognizes the bisexual male character Bob Kennedy, who rescues and marries the novel's protagonist Susan, not only as a forerunner to later characters, but also as a model for Orton to reinvent himself as "the successful playwright as swaggering hooligan, ex-convict, working-class tough in a leather jacket". She also edited and introduced Lord Cucumber and The Boy Hairdresser, two of five short novels he wrote in collaboration with Halliwell, on their first publication in 1999.
She edited Joe Orton: A Casebook (2003), a collection of twelve essays, split into those that address Orton's works as literature and those that attempt to place them in the context of his life. The first section contains essays examining the plays Entertaining Mr. Sloane, The Good and Faithful Servant and The Erpingham Camp, as well as comparisons with Oscar Wilde, Caryl Churchill and even Jane Austen. The second section includes essays focusing on Orton's sexuality, his diaries, and the context in which he wrote, and includes a contribution by Orton and Halliwell's biographer, Simon Shepherd. Coppa wrote the final essay on a 1995 conversation between the actor John Alderton and Orton's sister, who represents his estate. Tom Smith, in a review for Theatre Journal, describes the collection as an "excellent scholarly resource" with "diverse and interesting" content, but considers that Coppa has not gone far enough towards broadening Orton scholarship, which has focused on a limited selection of his works.