He has taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder since 1973, where he has been Associate Director of the Honors Program since 1990.  For about five of the last thirty years he has lived in Rome, Italy, teaching and studying.  He is editor of a critical edition of the Greek text of Euripides' Bacchae (Teubner, 1982) and author of over 100 articles and reviews on scholarly, pedagogical and popular topics.  He currently works with the Classics Department of the University of Urbino, Italy on ancient Greek lyric poetry.

He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the CU Committee on Research.  His book, The Devil Knows Latin:  Why America Needs the Classical Tradition is widely cited in the new Classical Education movement.

In recent years Dr. Kopff has become increasingly interested in the reasons why some of the most creative societies in history, e.g. Renaissance Italy, Reformation Germany and the America of the Founding, were fascinated by the Greek and Latin cultures of the ancient Mediterranean.  Why did Greece and Rome appeal to men as different as Dante and Machiavelli, Thomas More and Martin Luther, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson? He studies and teaches texts and traditions, from science to Sophocles, that arose in the ancient world and remain important and influential today, including the tradition of consensual self-rule, which the Greeks called democracy, and the religion of the Bible.