Professor Emeritus Thomas R. Hart

Thomas R. Hart, Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon , died on January 17, 2010, after a brief illness. Tom was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, on January 10, 1925. He attended Yale University, earning a B.A. in Spanish and Portuguese (summa cum laude, 1948) and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (1952, with a dissertation entitled A History of Spanish Literary History, 1800-1850).

Following instructorships at Amherst and Harvard, he was an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University (1955-60) and an associate at Emory University (1960-64) before moving, as full professor, to the University of Oregon, from which he retired in 1990. Through his teaching, research, and professional service, Tom epitomized and fostered the interdisciplinary aspirations of the humanities at Oregon.

Apart from his own publications, the most visible sign of his commitment to comparatist approaches to Romance literary studies was his longstanding service to Comparative Literature. After six years as assistant editor (1966-72), he served as editor for twenty-three years (1972-1995), and the significance of this contribution is currently recognized in the title of Editor Emeritus. Tom’s dedication to comparative literary studies also underwrote his teaching, both in the Department of Romance Languages and in the Comparative Literature Program, where he offered a broad spectrum of undergraduate and graduate courses that consistently cut across the boundaries of national literary traditions.

In short, Tom’s distinguished international reputation is grounded in his combined achievements as scholar, teacher, and editor. His was a career marked by prolific and wide-ranging, original publications and an enviable sequence of prestigious national and international research grants (American Philosophical Society, Fulbright, Gulbenkian, National Endowment for the Humanities) and fellowships (Camargo Foundation, Institute of Romance Studies, London), as well as invitations to teach and conduct research at the Universities of Oxford and Chicago.

For more than fifty-five years, Tom was a rigorous and demanding teacher, a consummate scholar, and a constructive and attentive reader of the academic prose of many colleagues. Indeed, through his careful and precise writing, his teaching, and his masterful editing, he engaged in a theoretically informed dialogue between languages, literatures, and cultures that was born of a deeply felt appreciation of a human creativity that transcends boundaries of place and time, even though artistic expression is inevitably determined by the specific conditions of particular cultural moments.

Those fortunate enough to have studied with him will recall with affection his dry wit and exacting standards in every aspect of coursework — and the deep and abiding love of words that shone through every textual reading. They will also remember his eclectic tastes, the impressive breadth and depth of his reading, his love of music and of dogs, and his ability to unpack the complexities of Renaissance drama through the deconstruction of Road Runner cartoons.

After his retirement in 1990, Tom continued to pursue research in his field, publishing two additional books and a number of articles. A few weeks before his death, he wrote, for Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt, a brilliant report on a new, 900-page novel by the distinguished Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina.

He is survived by his wife Margaret (née Fulton), whom he married in 1945, their son John, and their daughter Kathy, as well as by four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Story contributed by Steven Rendall, UO Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages, Caroline Jewers, Professor of French at the University of Kansas, and Julian Weiss, Professor of Spanish at King’s College, London.