Rate My Professor Michael Cop

Dr Michael Cop is a Senior Lecturer in the English and Linguistics Programme at the University of Otago, part of the Division of Humanities. He holds a BA from Sainte-Anne University, an MA in Theology from the University of Notre Dame Australia, and MA and PhD degrees in English from the University of Otago. Cop joined the University of Otago as a Lecturer in March 2005 following his PhD and has since been promoted to Senior Lecturer. His academic career at Otago includes supervising postgraduate students and contributing to programme administration.

Cop's research specializations include writing, Renaissance Biblical literature, Biblical harmonies, Shakespeare, John Milton, and graphic novels. He teaches a range of courses such as ENGL 121: English Literature: The Remix, ENGL 128: Essentials of Communication, ENGL 131: Controversial Classics, ENGL 218: Shakespeare: Stage, Page and Screen, ENGL 228: Writing for the Professions, ENGL 311: Renaissance Literature, ENGL 490: Dissertation, and HUMS 501: Writing and Revision for Graduate Research. He assembled the open textbook Essentials of Communication in 2023. Cop has chaired sessions at conferences including SHARP 2023 and participated in a panel on AI and sustainable education at Adhigam-Aayam-3.0 in India in 2025. His key publications encompass literary criticism, pedagogy, and comics studies. Notable works include "Blockage-path reading in comics: Patterns in blockage layouts from ten popular comics" (Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics, 2025), "Judging a type of character: The anointing women, mindfulness, and beginner's mind" (Junctures, 2025, with J. Atlas), "To explain, to commend, to correct: Johnson on notes and on Shakespeare, in The Tempest and the Dictionary" (Age of Johnson, 2025, with P. Tankard), a review of Playbooks and their Readers in Early Modern England (Parergon, 2025), "‘Words, Words, Words’: Making Comics and Sense of the Three Texts of Hamlet" (Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2022), "A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.2.25" (The Explicator, 2020), "Reviewing Failure as Part of Reflection: A Potential Predictor of Health Sciences Students’ Successes" (International Journal of Health Sciences Education, 2019, with H. Hatfield), and "An athletes [sic] performance: Can a possessive apostrophe predict success?" (English Today, 2017, with H. Hatfield). Additional contributions include articles on Milton in Milton Quarterly (2012) and exegesis in Relegere (2014).