Course Lecturer
Areas of Interest:
Modern transatlantic literature, literature and art related to Jewish history and culture
Education:
Ph.D., English, Stanford University, 2013
B.A., English, Yale University, 2006
Biography:
Emily Kopley works in two sometimes-overlapping fields: (1) transatlantic modernism and (2) literature and art related to Jewish history and culture. Her first book, the critical biography Virginia Woolf and Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2021), was the subject of a 2024 forum in Woolf Studies Annual. On Woolf, Dr. Kopley has published articles in The Review of English Studies and English Literature in Transition, book chapters in Teaching Modernist Women’s Writing in English (MLA Publications, 2021) and Unpacking the Personal Library (Wilfred Laurier UP, 2022), and short essays in various outlets. An article of hers on anonymous authorship appears in Mémoires du Livre / Studies in Book Culture. Dr. Kopley’s writing on Woolf has been translated into Portuguese (Uma Prosa Apaixonada, trans. Tomaz Tadeu, 2023).
Dr. Kopley’s research on American theologian and novelist Arthur A. Cohen has been published in Studies in American Jewish Literature and Rethinking the Messianic Idea in Judaism (Indiana UP, 2015). Dr. Kopley has also written for AJS Review and AJS Perspectives. She is on the board of the Montreal Foundation for Yiddish Culture and of the Canadian Society for Jewish Studies.
Dr. Kopley has given invited talks at the University of Toronto, Washington State University, the University of Haifa, Oxford University, and Harvard University. In 2021 she delivered the inaugural Fall Lecture of the International Virginia Woolf Society. She has received grants from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Modern Language Association, the Association of Jewish Studies, and the Access Copyright Foundation.
Dr. Kopley also writes and speaks to an audience beyond the academy. She has published in the TLS, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the OUP Blog. She has also spoken on the TLS podcast, CBC radio, and widely in the Montreal community.
From 2013 to 2016, Dr. Kopley was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in McGill’s English department. She subsequently taught in the English department at Université de Montréal and then held the position of Researcher in Residence at the Concordia University Library. In McGill’s Jewish Studies department, she teaches courses including Introduction to Jewish Literature, American Jewish Literature, Holocaust Memoirs, Jewish Children’s Literature, and Jewish Biography. She has been recognized repeatedly by McGill’s “Thank a Prof” program.
For more information, see https://mcgill.academia.edu/EmilyKopley