Together with Professor John Hudson, she is a director of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Law and Literature at the University of St Andrews.
She studied at Somerville College, Oxford graduating with an MA (Hons) with first class honours, and received a DPhil in 1983.
In 2004, she returned to the UK to take up the position of Berry Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews.
Her book The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama won the Roland Bainton Prize for Literature in 2008.
[4] In 2012 Hutson was Dr Alice Griffin Fellow in Shakespearean Studies at the University of Auckland;[5] she also gave the Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures, on the subject of "Circumstantial Shakespeare";[6] the lectures were published by Oxford University Press under the same title in 2015.