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.
[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.
Volume I, 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;[10] although the reviewer in Speculum 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.
[27] Chance was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980[28] and has also received membership in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
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.