University Professor and past president of the Modern Language Association of America, Linda Hutcheon, has just retired from the University of Toronto.  Professor Hutcheon is the most cited living Canadian scholar of literature, the only worthy successor to Northrop Frye. According to the citation index Publish or Perish, she has been cited 5,605 times in Google Books.  Her h-index, a formula based on how many books a scholar has produced as well as on citations, is 17, the same h-index as Marshall McLuhan or Salman Rushdie.

But, more than her publications, Linda has transformed the ethos of the academic units she works in by making all relations warmer and more human. The two words most associated with her professional presence among us are generosity and community. All her students can testify to her generosity. Since coming to U of T 1989 she has supervised 61 PhD theses!  She has served on another 61 thesis committees! Her example has taught all of us, her students and her colleagues alike, what the mentor-student relation can be.  Linda has also provided us with a wholly new model of what literary scholarship can be.  It does not have to be solitary. Research, publication, and teaching, she has taught us, are all collective enterprises.

Upon her retirement, in her honour the Department of English and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto have established a scholarship in Linda’s name to be awarded to an incoming PhD student in English or Comparative Literature working in the areas of contemporary literature, theory, or interdisciplinary approaches to literature. If you would like to donate to the Linda Hutcheon Scholarship Fund, it is possible to make an online contribution by visiting either the Comparative Literature (http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/complit/) or English web-sites (http://www.english.utoronto.ca/Page4.aspx) and following the links.