Jane Chance (born 1945), also known as Jane Chance Nitzsche , is an American scholar specializing in medieval English literature, gender studies, and J. R. R. Tolkien . She spent most of her career at Rice University , where since her retirement she has been the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor Emerita in English.

Education [ edit ]

Chance earned her BA from Purdue University in 1967 and her MA (1968) and PhD (1971) from the University of Illinois at Urbana?Champaign . ^[1]

Teaching [ edit ]

She taught at the University of Saskatchewan and then moved to Rice University in 1973 to teach Old English literature ; she was the first woman appointed to a tenure-track position in the English department there. ^{[2] [3]} She was appointed to the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in 2008 and became emerita upon her retirement in 2011. ^{[1] [2]} She is founder president of the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages. ^[3]

At Rice, Chance established what became the Medieval Studies Program; she headed the first Women's Studies program within the English department, which was nationally noted. ^[3] In the late 1980s she was the first president of the Rice Commission on Women. ^{[2] [3] [4]} She unsuccessfully sued the university for gender discrimination in 1988. ^{[5] [6] [7]} In 1995 she established and funded the Julia Mile Chance Prize for Excellence in Teaching, named for her mother, to honor women faculty members. ^[3]

Comparative literature and medievalism [ edit ]

As Jane Chance Nitzsche, Chance published a revised version of her dissertation as The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages in 1975. ^[8] Beginning in 1994, she published a three-volume history of medieval mythography . Volume 1, From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, A.D. 433?1177 , was termed "monumental" and "highly detailed" by Sarah Stanbury in Arthuriana who nonetheless found the focus on gender poorly supported; ^[9] although the reviewer in Speculum called it "disappointing"; ^{[3] [10]} Volume 2, From the School of Chartres to the Court at Avignon, 1177?1350 , was called "immensely learned and ambitious" in the same journal in 2002. ^[11] The final volume, The Emergence of Italian Humanism, 1321?1475 , appeared in 2015, and was judged by one reviewer to be less comprehensive than claimed. ^[12] In 1995 she also published Mythographic Chaucer: the Fabulation of Sexual Politics . ^{[2] [13]}

Other works in which Chance focuses on medieval women and gender studies include Woman as Hero in Old English Literature (1986), ^[14] which investigated, among other things, the concept of women as peace-weavers ^[15] and their frequent failure, ^[16] and The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women (2007); ^[17] she edited Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages (1996) ^[18] and Women Medievalists and the Academy (2005), which Helen Damico , writing in JEGP , called "massive in size and major in significance". ^[19]

Tolkien scholarship [ edit ]

Chance is a leading Tolkien scholar . ^[20] Her books in this field include Tolkien's Art: A 'Mythology for England' (1979; revised edition 2001), ^[21] The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power (1992; revised edition 2001), in which she uses the theoretical framework of Michel Foucault , ^{[22] [23]} Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader (2004), ^[24] and Tolkien, Self and Other: "This Queer Creature" (2016), a biography with literary analysis. ^[25]

Honors and distinctions [ edit ]

Chance was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980 ^[26] and has also received membership in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. ^[13]

She won SCMLA Best Book awards for both the Medieval Mythography series and The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women . ^[2]

In 2013 she was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters from Purdue University ^{[1] [2] [13]} and honored in a symposium at the International Congress on Medieval Studies organized by the Medieval Foremothers' Society. ^[13]

References [ edit ]

External links [ edit ]

• Personal page at Rice University