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. During World War II, he served in the US Navy, studying Japanese at the University of Colorado and Oklahoma State University. After the war, 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 taught at Johns Hopkins University and at Emory University before moving, as full professor, to the University of Oregon in 1964, 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.

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 and fellowships, 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. 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. Please sign the guest book at www.registerguard.com/legacy