Faculty Bios

Linda H. Chance

Professor of Japanese Studies

Linda Chance has spent her career at the University of Pennsylvania, with the exception of brief periods teaching at Tsukuba University in Japan and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. As part of Penn's faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, she teaches classical Japanese language and literature, while assisting in promotion of and instruction in modern Japanese language. A native of southern New Jersey and a frequent resident of Japan, she earned her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1990.

Professor Chance's primary research is on medieval prose writings and their reception by later readers, with a particular focus on the literary miscellany genre. She is the author of Formless in Form: Kenkô, Tsurezuregusa, and the Rhetoric of Japanese Fragmentary Prose, as well as articles on the canonization of the miscellany. She approaches Japanese prose with special attention to Buddhist thought, linguistic and knowledge practices, genre theory, musical transmission of literary texts, and gender, which is at the core of her current project on the role of the feminine in Japanese literature as presented both by female and masquerading male authors.

Grants from the Social Science Research Council and the Japan Foundation have supported her research. She is a contributing editor for language pedagogy for Education About Asia, a publication of the Association for Asian Studies, and has served on the National Language Board for Japanese as it prepared the LangNet database project under the direction of the National Foreign Language Center.

Linda H. Chance
852 Williams Hall
Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Tel: 215-898-6334
E-mail: lchance@mail.sas.upenn.edu