Col. Knepper arrived at VMI in the fall of 2014. A recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Teaching Award and holder of the Bruce C. Gottwald, Jr. ’81 Chair for Academic Excellence, Col. Knepper teaches a wide range of courses, including American Literary Traditions, Ways of Reading, the ERHS capstone sequence, and a seminar on Moby-Dick. He especially enjoys teaching Philosophy and Literature, where he can discuss big questions with cadets, and American Modernism, which features favorite authors such as Claude McKay, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He has directed capstone projects, SURI projects, independent studies, and honors theses on a variety of topics, from the poetry of Langston Hughes to the philosophy of Simone Weil, from Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic conventions to Byzantine iconography. Col. Knepper is the faculty adviser of VMI’s chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the international English honor society, and helps organize an annual trip for cadets to the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia.
Col. Knepper studied American literature in graduate school at the University of Virginia, and this remains a major teaching and research interest. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Robert Frost Review. He writes metrical poems in the tradition of Frost and is the founding editor of New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry.
Since arriving at VMI, he has become increasingly interested in the intersection of philosophy, aesthetics, and religion. He is particularly interested in the contemporary philosophers William Desmond and Byung-Chul Han. In 2022, SUNY Press published his book Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond. In 2024, Polity published Byung-Chul Han: A Critical Introduction, which he co-wrote with Ethan Stoneman and Robert Wyllie. He also edited the volume, A Heart of Flesh: William Desmond and the Bible, which was released in 2023 by Cascade Books.
Professor
English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies