Jane Chance

Ph.D., University of Illinois-Urbana
Professor of English
Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Chair
Office: Herring Hall 235
Phone: 713-348-2625
Web Page: Dr. Chance's Website
Email: jchance@rice.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Professor Chance has published 22 books, including The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women (2007; winner of the 2008 SCMLA Prize), The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (1975); Tolkien’s Art: A ‘Mythology for England’ (1979; rev. ed. 1999); Woman as Hero in Old English Literature (1986); The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power (1992; rev. ed. 1999; trans. into Japanese 2003); Medieval Mythography, vol. 1, From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, AD 433–1177 (winner of the 1995 SCMLA Prize), and vol. 2, From the School of Chartres to the Court at Avignon, 1177–1349 (2000); and The Mythographic Chaucer: The Fabulation of Sexual Politics (1996). Dr. Chance has also edited, among many collections, two guest issues of Studies in Medievalism (on Twentieth-century Medievalism and the Inklings); Tolkien the Medievalist (2003;  twice a finalist for the Mythopoeic Prize), Tolkien and the Invention of Myth (2005), and, with Alfred Siewers, Tolkien's Modern Middle Ages (2006). She also has edited a 15th-century poem, The Assembly of Gods (1993), translated Christine de Pizan’s The Letter of Othea to Hector (1990), and edited an historiographic collection, Women Medievalists and the Academy (2005). General editor of the Library of Medieval Women, with more than 30 titles published or contracted, series editor of the Greenwood Guides to Historic Events in the Medieval World, and general editor of the new Praeger Series on the Middle Ages, she has also served as field editor for the Chaucer Encyclopedia and serves as editorial board member of College Literature and postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies. Author of over a hundred articles and reviews, she was awarded the 2005 Biennial Prize for Best Essay from the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship for her essay on Heloise and Abelard; her article on Beowulf has been reprinted seven times. She has received NEH and Guggenheim Fellowships, fellowships from the University of Utah Humanities Center and the University of Edinburgh Institute forAdvanced Studies in the Humanities, residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center at Bellagio, and membership in the Institute for Advanced Study­Princeton. Currently Chair of the MLA Roth Prize Committee for Best Translation, she has served as founding president of the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages and as vice president of the Texas Faculty Association and has directed an NEH Summer Seminar on "Chaucer and Mythography" and an NEH Summer Institute on "The Literary Traditions of Medieval Women," both for college teachers. She teaches courses on Chaucer, Middle English literature, Medieval Women Writers, Arthurian literature, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dante, Mythologies, and Medieval Cultures.