EUGENE, Ore.–It’s a beautiful Friday afternoon near the end of the spring term and students in Hilary Hart’s "Introduction to Literature" class at the University of Oregon are fidgeting as the class gets underway.

Minutes later, Hart, a graduate student who hails from Palo Alto, is leading the class of 35 students into an in-depth analysis of Dorothy Allison’s "A River of Names," a short story about a young woman’s horrible recollections of discarded lives in poor, rural South Carolina.

"Why did she choose that for the title of her story?" Hart asks about the author. "What’s the choice there? What’s the effect?"

A student answers that the story reads kind of like an obituary.

"Yeah," Hart replies enthusiastically. "I think what the story says to me is about human worth–when people start to think of you as a number and devalue you."

Sitting on a large wooden instructor’s table with her legs crossed and dressed in jeans, Hart teaches in the seminar-style of a professional eager to involve her students in an exploration of learning. Watching her, it’s hard to believe she is only a graduate teaching fellow (GTF), one of 1,200 or so student teachers at the university.

But Hart is no ordinary GTF. A winner of the university’s 1999 Graduate Teaching Fellow Award for excellence in teaching, she brings a talent to the classroom that has earned her recognition around campus. For most students, only age distinguishes Hart, 31, from her upper-division peers.

Adam Rice, a junior advertising major from Oregon City and one of Hart’s students, says that he enjoys coming to her classes because "she has a way of engaging us with the readings. Her style is pretty open and free and encourages comments that don’t usually come that easily."

Hart has been a teaching assistant for five years now, a position she has held since getting accepted into the doctoral degree program in English. Since then, she has taught introductory literature and composition courses.

At first, she says she wasn’t really sure she liked teaching and lacked confidence in her teaching ability. But after teaching a course about film, "The History of the Motion Picture," a career in academia became a goal of hers.

In that class, Hart gave a lecture on Steven Spielberg’s "E.T." that "really surprised our students," says Kathleen Karlyn, a film studies professor and one of Hart’s mentors. "She demonstrated how the film’s visual imagery gave a powerful critique of an ideal of masculinity based on aggression. It challenged them to see levels of meaning buried in this seemingly straightforward example of entertainment.

"What makes Hilary unique," Karlyn continues, "is that she has managed to put her love of film to work in a program geared toward literature. Both film and literature draw on similar narrative conventions and cultural issues. The topics that interest Hilary can be studied in both literary and cinematic texts, and she has found a way to do so."

Hart says she enjoys straddling the divide between the disciplines.

"The scholarship coming out of film is some of the most vital and rich in academia," she says. "It’s the culture that most of us are participating in now. I think because the movie industry is so large commercially, and reaches so many people, it has attracted more interest from scholars. Over time, there has been a recognition that we need to look beyond literature and what’s been canonized and think about what’s culturally relevant."

Though Hart approaches literature and film with a critical eye, she’s not above the kind of smart, ironic cultural observation that has leaked into academia of late.

On her office door is a Matt Groening cartoon titled "A Brief History of Cinema" that is a flow chart of movie clichés, juxtaposed with a photocopy of Jean-Paul Satre explaining his existential faith in the virtues of his crumbling Dodge Dart. Clearly, unlike some English teachers, Hart has a real sense of humor.

Her cheerful nature could have something to do with where she’s from. Indeed, Hart possesses the kind of preternatural geniality and genetically determined good looks that seem naturally selected for survival in certain parts of California, especially Palo Alto. The city’s unique combination of sunshine, Stanford and high per-capita Porsche ownership also might have something to with it, but one thing is definite: The more you learn about Hart, the more obvious the influence of her Silicon Valley upbringing.

"Palo Alto is such a rarefied place," admits Hart, who graduated from "PALY"–Palo Alto High–in 1987. "I mean, it’s just so affluent. It’s sort of a bubble. It wasn’t until I left Palo Alto that I realized not everywhere else is like Palo Alto, where the weather is perfect, where the streets are clean, the cars are new…."

But, she adds, "having grown up in Palo Alto really doesn’t give me special powers. I don’t have any special knowledge of computers or insight about them. My high school classmates who still live in the area don’t automatically make oodles of money. Living there means that you are likely to participate in the entrepreneurial and/or technological culture, but it doesn’t make you a representative of what the valley is increasingly known for, enormous profits from technology."

Though Hart comes from a modest Palo Alto background, she feels blessed by the varied influences she gained growing up there.

Her father, Richard Hart, is an environmentalist concerned with forestry issues. Her stepfather, Mark Nokes, is an optical physicist who works for Tencor, a consultant in the semiconductor and microelectronics industries. Hart’s mother, Paula Nokes, is a personal trainer for the well-to-do. One of Hilary Hart’s good friends from high school, Susanna Beck, recently finished fourth in this year’s Olympic Trials for the marathon.

With such influences, Hart seems destined for success no matter what she decides to do. In the future, she says she’d like to be teaching film and literature at a college or university, "where the students are bright and lively and the faculty collegial," she says.

Will she go back to Palo Alto? She’s not sure, but for now she’s enjoying her time in Eugene at the University of Oregon.

"The university has really grown on me–it’s a really nice, warm community," she says. "I’ve met a lot of friends both inside and outside the academic community."

#H-2218/Hometown,Special/wbs