Francesca Coppa

[9] 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.

[7][8][10] 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".

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.

[13] 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.

[22] In 2007, with Naomi Novik, Rebecca Tushnet and others, Coppa was a founder of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), a nonprofit body that aims "to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and fan cultures";[23] she served on the board until 2012, and remains an emeritus director.

[26] She is particularly known for her work documenting the history of the fanvid – which she defines as "a visual essay" that intends "to make an argument or tell a story"[27] and uses the accompanying music track as "an interpretive lens to help the viewer to see the source text differently"[28] – and has published on vidding as a women's practice, distinct from other forms of fan-created videos.

[35] Coppa edited a collection of fan fiction, The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age, published by University of Michigan Press in 2017 and intended as a college-level teaching text.

[26] Stephanie Burt points out that the many previous academic works on fan fiction did not include extended examples and "a printed collection of the stuff, from a university press, with no serial numbers removed" would probably not have been possible as recently as 2012 because of the threat of legal action, attributing the change at least in part to the advocacy of OTW.

[36] The Fanfiction Reader assembles short, non-adult-rated stories covering a range of fan fiction genres, based in widely known American or British sources,[26][36][37] which Burt describes as Coppa's idea of "good on-ramps to the phenomenon".