Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

Professor Helen Cooper is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include Anglo-Norman and Middle English romance; the late fourteenth century, especially Chaucer; Chaucer's afterlife; the fifteenth century; connections between the Middle Ages and the early modern, especially in relation to Shakespeare and other drama, pastoral literature and romance.

Professor Cooper is essentially interested in the continuity of literature across the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Her thesis was on pastoral (literature that uses the shepherd world as a metaphor for the real one) from the late Classical period to Milton. Her most recent book is on romance, from its invention in the twelfth century to the death of Shakespeare. She has also published extensively on the Canterbury Tales.

Professor Cooper was an undergraduate, research student and research fellow at Cambridge before being appointed as the first woman fellow at University College, Oxford, in 1978. In 2004, she returned to Cambridge as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance in English, a post originally created for C.S.Lewis.