Dr. John M. Pendergast

Dr. John Pendergast entered the Army Reserve as a private in 1981, playing tuba in the 313th Army Reserve Band in Hoover, Alabama, and earning a B.A. cum laude in music from Birmingham-Southern College in 1985. He entered the Active Army in 1986 and graduated from the Defense Language Institute with Honors in Russian in 1987. 

After serving as an interpreter in Europe under the protocols of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces and Conventional Armed Forces treaties, he completed Officer Candidate School and was commissioned a Military Intelligence (MI) lieutenant in 1993. He led a platoon, served as primary battalion staff, watch officer, and commanded a company in MI tours in Korea and Ft Gordon, Georgia. 

He was selected for Advanced Civil Schooling by West Point and, after completing his MA in Russian Language and Literature at the University of Arizona in 2002, taught Russian in the former Department of Foreign Languages for four years, earning the rank of assistant professor. He served as an ARCENT project manager in Kuwait and Iraq from 2006-07. 

Upon retirement at the rank of major in 2008, he was selected for the program in Comparative Literature as a Chancellor’s Fellow at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, earning both an MPhil and PhD by 2015. Since 2008, he has taught Russian and German in the Department of English and World Languages as a civilian. He became the Head Department Academic Counselor in 2016 and the Russian Program Director in 2019. 

His book Joan of Arc on the Stage was published in 2019 by Palgrave-MacMillan. He has served as Chair of the Modern Language Association’s Executive Committee on Opera and Musical Performance. He has published collaboratively on Second Language Acquisition topics and presented at conferences of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, the International Slavic Readings Conference, Daugavpils University, Latvia, the American Musicological Association of Greater New York, and the Congress of the Canadian Association of University Teachers of German.

Dr. Pendergast lives with his husband João in Highland Falls, NY, and enjoys spending time with his grown daughters Natalya of Tampa, FL, and Alexandra of Albany, NY.