Clara Thomas has been teaching and writing in the Canadian Literature filed since the 1940s. Her first book, "Canadian Novelists, 1920-45", was published in 1946 and her latest one, "Chapters in a Lucky Life: A Memoir", in 1999. Her concern for women in academe and for the Canadian field has been, and remains, of prime interest to her.

Born in 1906 at Devlin in western Ontario, Homer Armstrong Thompson, grew up on a farm in the lower Fraser Valley of British Columbia. After completing his studies at the University of British Columbia he proceeded to graduate work at the University of Michigan where he took his Ph.D. degree in 1929. At this time the excavation of the Agora or civic center of ancient Athens was about to be started by the American School of Classical Studies, and Homer Armstrong Thompson was appointed as one of the first members of the supervisory staff. Since then he has been associated continuously with this project, directing it in the years 1947-68; he is still active in the program of publication. From 1932 to 1947 he served on the faculty of the University of Toronto, eventually as chairman of the Department of Art and Archaeology. Through most of this period he divided the year between Toronto and Athens. His war service was with the Canadian Navy on loan to the Royal Navy for naval intelligence in the Mediterranean. Since 1947 he has been a member of the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, but he has also spent time as a visiting professor at various universities, among them Princeton, Columbia, California, Oxford, Aberdeen, Sydney. His publications have been chiefly in the field of Greek art and archaeology with special focus on the results of the excavations in Athens. Among his honors: membership in the British Academy, the gold medal of the Archaeological Institute of America for Archaeolocigal Achievement (1972) and honorary citzenship of Athens.

Like many distinguished Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada, Professor Thornton is a Scot. His course at the University of Glasgow was interrupted by four years in the British Army; he landed in Normandy on D-Day as a tank officer and served through the campaign that followed. He has a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Oxford, and has taught at Trinity College, Oxford, at the Universtiy of Aberdeen, at the University of the West Indies, and since 1960 at the University of Toronto. The author of a series of important books, he is a profound scholar, a very brilliant writer, and one of the greatest living authorities on the history of the British Empire and Commonwealth.