Jane Chance | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1945 (age 79–80) |
| Years active | 1973–2011 |
| Known for | Tolkien studies |
| Notable work | Tolkien's Art: A 'Mythology for England' |
Jane Chance (born 1945), also known asJane Chance Nitzsche, is an American scholar specializing in medieval English literature, gender studies, andJ. R. R. Tolkien. She spent most of her career atRice University, where since her retirement she has been theAndrew W. Mellon DistinguishedProfessor Emerita in English.
Chance earned her BA fromPurdue University in 1967 with Highest Distinction and an Honors in English and her MA in English (1968) and PhD in Medieval English Literature (1971) from theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.[1]
She taught at theUniversity of Saskatchewan and then moved to Rice University in 1973 to teachOld English literature; she was the first woman appointed to atenure-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 1982 she was the first ever woman on the faculty at Rice University to gain maternity leave.[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] She attempted to appeal the case in the early 1990s but was unsuccessful.[8] 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]
As Jane Chance Nitzsche, Chance published a revised version of her dissertation asThe Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages in 1975.[9] Beginning in 1994, she published a three-volume history of medievalmythography. Volume I,From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, A.D. 433–1177, was termed "monumental" and "highly detailed" by Sarah Stanbury inArthuriana who nonetheless found the focus on gender poorly supported;[10] although the reviewer inSpeculum called it "disappointing";[3][11] 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.[12] 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.[13] In 1995 she also publishedMythographic Chaucer: the Fabulation of Sexual Politics.[2][14]
Other works in which Chance focuses on medieval women and gender studies includeWoman as Hero in Old English Literature (1986),[15] which investigated, among other things, the concept of women aspeace-weavers[16] and their frequent failure,[17] andThe Literary Subversions of Medieval Women (2007);[18] she editedGender and Text in the Later Middle Ages (1996)[19] andWomen Medievalists and the Academy (2005), whichHelen Damico, writing inJEGP, called "massive in size and major in significance".[20]
Chance is a leadingTolkien scholar.[21] Her books in this field includeTolkien's Art: A 'Mythology for England' (1979; revised edition 2001),[22]The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power (1992; revised edition 2001), in which she uses the theoretical framework ofMichel Foucault,[23][24]Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader (2004),[25] andTolkien, Self and Other: "This Queer Creature" (2016), a biography with literary analysis.[26] Her book,Tolkien's Art: A 'Mythology for England' (1979; revised edition 2001) is considered to be one of the first scholarly studies of Tolkien's works. Through looking at Middle Earth in a new way with a Medieval lens, she adds a whole new world to the study of the works of Tolkien.[27] She appeared in a 2001 episode ofNational Geographic, "Beyond the Movie:The Lord of the Rings" and another interview she did withNational Geographic ended up in the Collector's DVD Edition of Peter Jackson'sThe Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.[27]
Chance was awarded aGuggenheim Fellowship in 1980[28] and has also received membership in theInstitute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.[14] In 1998 she won the IMAPCT Award for Outstanding Rice Faculty Women from Rice University.[29]
She received numerous fellowships throughout the years for her research on Medieval Mythography. A few of the fellowships she received were the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the late 1970s, a Residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio in Lake Como, Italy in 1988, a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh in the late 1980s, and a Eccles Research Fellow position at the University of Utah in the mid 1990s.[27]
She wonSCMLA Best Book awards for both theMedieval Mythography series andThe Literary Subversions of Medieval Women.[2]
In 2013 she was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters from Purdue University[1][2][14] and honored in a symposium at theInternational Congress on Medieval Studies organized by the Medieval Foremothers' Society.[14]
| Year[30] | Title | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2002 | National Geographic: Beyond the Movie, "The Lord of the Rings" | Herself | National Geographic TV DVD Directed by Lisa Kors |
| 2005 | Ringers: Lord of the Fans | Herself | SONY Pictures DVD Directed by Carlene Cordova |
