Jane Chance facts for kids

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 and career

Chance earned her BA from Purdue University in 1967 and her MA (1968) and PhD (1971) from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

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. She was appointed to the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in 2008 and became emerita upon her retirement in 2011. She is founder president of the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages.

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

Honors

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

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

In 2013 she was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters from Purdue University and honored in a symposium at the International Congress on Medieval Studies organized by the Medieval Foremothers' Society.