Dr. John M. Pendergast, Ph.D.

Dr. John Pendergast is an associate professor and director of the Russian language program in the Department of English & World Languages (DEWL) at West Point.

He entered the Army Reserve as a private in 1981, playing tuba in the 313th Army Reserve Band in Hoover, Alabama, and earning a Bachelor of Arts degree 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 as a military intelligence lieutenant in 1993. He led a platoon, served as primary battalion staff and watch officer, and commanded a company in military intelligence tours in Korea and Fort Gordon, Georgia. He served as an ARCENT project manager in Kuwait and Iraq from 2006 to 2007.

Dr. Pendergast was selected for advanced civil schooling by the United States Military Academy (USMA) and completed his Master of Arts in Russian language and literature at the University of Arizona in 2002. He taught Russian in USMA's former Department of Foreign Languages (now DEWL) for four years, earning the rank of assistant professor. 

Upon retirement 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 M.Phil. and Ph.D. by 2015. Since 2008, Dr. Pendergast has taught Russian and German at West Point 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. Dr. Pendergast 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 at Daugavpils University in Latvia, the American Musicological Association of Greater New York and the Congress of the Canadian Association of University Teachers of German.

Pendergast lives with his husband, João, in Highland Falls, New York, and enjoys spending time with his grown daughters, Natalya of Tampa, Florida, and Alexandra of Albany, New York.