Sean Robert Hoare

Sean Robert Hoare, 65, a professor of literature at Marymount University, died Nov. 11, 2012, at Virginia Hospital Center Arlington from complications of congestive heart failure. He was born Aug. 2, 1947, in Springfield, Mass., where his father, John, was a police officer and his mother, Rita (Connolly), a teacher. His father and all his grandparents were born in Ireland. He attended Springfield’s Classical High School and received a bachelor’s degree in English, history and philosophy at Catholic University of America and a doctorate in English and American literature at Stanford University, where his dissertation was a study of autobiographical form in James Joyce’s Ulysses. After teaching briefly at Catholic and Georgetown, Dr. Hoare joined the Marymount faculty in 1980. At Marymount, he taught an advanced seminar in autobiography and pursued his work on Joyce, but his scholarly and teaching interests expanded to embrace Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Jack London, the literature and popular culture of the American 1930s, and other topics. He often presented at meetings of the Popular Culture Association, and he was keenly interested in hardboiled detective literature, film noir, B westerns, and western novels, especially those of Ernest Haycox. His most recent writing was a paper on Conrad and John Le Carré. He was an avid theatergoer with preferences for Shakespeare and Shaw. Sean Hoare is survived by his wife of 42 years, Roxanne Rhodes Hoare; his sister, Maura S. Cullen, and her children and grandchildren; his mother-in-law, Barbara Rhodes; a large extended family in the United States, Ireland, and Australia; and a host of loving friends and grateful students. A memorial service will take place at 11:00 on Friday, November 16, at Our Lady Queen of Peace Church, 2700 S. 19th St., Arlington. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Sean R. Hoare Scholarship Fund at Marymount University or to the Washington Stage Guild.