New undergraduate Scholarship announced

February 15, 2018

The department is happy to announce the creation of the Elisabeth Wallace Undergraduate Scholarship, an in-course award open to political science undergraduate students enrolled in a Major or Specialist program.

Mary Elisabeth Wallace (1910 – 2009) was a distinguished political biographer and the first female faculty member in what was then known as the Department of Political Economy. She earned a Bachelor’s degree at the University of Toronto (1931) from the School of Social Work, then spent two years at Oxford, obtaining a Master’s degree in 1935. Years of work with the Protestant Children’s Homes, the Children’s Aid Society and The Infants Homes of Toronto, led to her appointment as Secretary of the Canadian Association of Social Workers in 1942. Two years later, she joined the University of Toronto as a lecturer in Social Work, moving to the Department of Political Economy in 1945. She completed her Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1950 and was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1971.

The award, which will provide substantial funding for students in financial need, honours Professor Wallace’s legacy while helping students in ways that align with the values that her teaching and scholarship represented. The scholarship has been made possible by a generous donation from the estate of Professor Frank Peers (1918 – 2016) and augmented by a contribution from Elisabeth Wallace’s estate, conveyed with great thoughtfulness by her niece Philippa Matheson.

Photo: Professor Elizabeth Wallace