Issue date: 2/1/02 Section: News

Media Credit: Brian Alford

Alex Vernon has joined the faculty at Hendrix as assistant professor of English. Vernon earned his bachelor's degree in general engineering from the United States Military Academy in West Point, N.Y. "I was the only English literature major in my class," he says with a smile. He earned a master's degree and a doctorate in English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His major focus was on 20th century American literature, with a minor focus on rhetoric and composition.

After completing his bachelor's degree, Vernon served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army for three years. He then left the service to begin graduate school. He completed his master's degree and went to work for two software companies, where he managed educational software projects and developed computer-based training software on CD-ROM.

At that point, he realized that he wasn't happy and that he missed academia. With renewed purpose, he decided to return to graduate school to obtain a doctorate in English and pursue a college teaching career.

His dissertation was titled "War Theory and Literary Practice: Hemingway, Salter, O'Brien." In it, he discussed the complexity of analyzing any text about war or the military and proposed an interdisciplinary approach to textual interpretation dubbed war theory.

"This academic field has been depopulated as Vietnam-era scholars retire," he explains. "I felt that my experience in the military and my perspective as a veteran of the Persian Gulf War gave me extra insights into this field."

Vernon met his wife, Michelle, when they were both in the master's degree program at UNC; they married in 1998, while he was pursuing the Ph.D. and she was in law school. As he neared completion of his doctorate, he began researching teaching opportunities.

"The job market for English professors was poor when I began looking," he says. "I knew I wanted to work at a small liberal arts school, and that Michelle and I wanted to live somewhere closer to Little Rock, which is her home."

When he learned of the opening at Hendrix, they were delighted. He interviewed at Hendrix and quickly decided that he had found what he was looking for. "I wanted to focus on teaching undergraduate students, and I wanted my relationships with them to extend outside class," he says. On his campus visit, he was impressed with the students, who he noticed took their studies seriously overall and seemed much more academically motivated than students at large state schools. Small classes also meant better classroom discussions, and he liked the good balance he saw for professors between teaching and their own scholarly pursuits.

He and Michelle felt blessed when he was offered the faculty position at Hendrix. He is teaching 20th century American fiction and poetry, writing, rhetoric, literary theory, literature and the environment, American war literature, and a seminar on Hemingway.

Michelle, who made the highest score on the bar exam in the state last July, is an attorney with Wright, Lindsey & Jennings in Little Rock, where the couple live. They are the proud owners of a Sheltie named Kosmo.

Vernon is the author of The Eyes of Orion: Five Tank Lieutenants in the Persian Gulf War, which was called "the single best book on the Persian Gulf War" by Military Heritage in October 2000. He is the editor of Arms and the Self: War, the Military, and Autobiography, a forthcoming collection of critical essays, and he has prepared numerous articles and conference presentations. He also writes personal essays and hopes to assemble his first collection this summer.

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