Antje Chan
Assistant Professor, School of Religious Studies. A joint appointment with the Department of English
Robert Stevenson Chair in Religion and Literature

D.Phil. (Oxford, Lincoln College, UK)
M.A. (Regent College, Canada)
B.A., M.A. (University of Lausanne, Switzerland)
Medieval pastoral literature; medieval liturgy; interplay between scholastic theology and literature; manuscript studies; mysticism; medieval drama; Anglo-Norman religious literature.
Antje Elisa Chan is jointly appointed between McGill’s School of Religious Studies and the Department of English. She holds the Robert Stevenson Chair in Religion and Literature. Her work lies at the intersection of spiritual theology and medieval devotional literature. Her research specializes in the religious culture of lay people in fifteenth-century England. She is working on a monograph, with the tentative title Public Worship in Fifteenth-Century England: Middle English Pastoralia as Textual Witnesses, which explores late medieval liturgical culture through the lens of vernacular sources. She currently holds an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which explores pastoral treatises such as ‘De visitatio infirmorum’ and Ars moriendi texts that promote shared social responsibility towards caring for the sick and the dying. Antje Chan teaches courses ranging from women’s visionary writings, medieval pastoral care, and biblical drama to the Bible and Western culture and English literature and the Bible. She is the Book Review Editor for the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures and welcomes expressions of interest in reviewing, or having reviewed, books on any aspects of medieval religious cultures.
Antje welcomes expressions of interest from prospective M.A. and Ph.D. students wishing to pursue research on aspects of religious textual culture in the Middle Ages, as well as medieval Christianity more broadly.
SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) Insight Development Grant for the project “Caring for the Dying: From Manuscript Culture to William Caxton's Ars Moriendi Print Editions” 2026–2028.
McGill SSHD Grant for the project “Neighbourliness as Medieval Health Care: The Textual Witnesses of Fifteenth-Century England”, 2025–2026.
TORCH (University of Oxford) Knowledge Exchange Grant for the project: “CELL – Exploring new theatre visions of Julian of Norwich”, 2021-2022.
Berrow Foundation Scholarship, Lincoln College, University of Oxford, 2018-2021.
Publications and Reviews:
Review of The Medieval Hospital: Literary Culture and Community in England, 1350-1550 by Nicole R. Rice, The Medieval Review, 2026.
“The Commonplace Book of Richard Hill” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages, edited by Michelle M. Sauer, et al. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025, 1–5.
Review of The Enterlude of the Godly Queene Hester and The Purim Spiel. Directed by Perry Mills. Performed by Edward’s Boys from King Edward VI School, Stratford-Upon-Avon. Salle de bal de la Grande Société, Fribourg, 19 July 2025. European Medieval Drama 29 (2025): 276–279.
“Kissing Matter: John Lydgate’s Lyric On Kissing at Verbum caro factum est and the Democratization of Contemplation.” Religions 15:1 (2024): 1-20.
Review of The Mystical Presence of Christ: The Exceptional and the Ordinary in Late Medieval Religion by Richard Kieckhefer.” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 50:2 (2024): 241-245.
“The Virtues of the Mass: Towards a Taxonomy of a Late Middle English Genre of Liturgical Significance.” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 49:1 (2023): 77-115.
Review of Chaucer’s Prayers: Writing Christian and Pagan Devotion by Megan E. Murton.” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 48:1(2022): 99-102.
“Participacion en la vida trinitaria de Dios: Cristo encarnado en las oraciones de los padres cistercienses.” Cistercium 69:270 (2018): 95–108.