Vita

Professor McNair (most people just call him Alex) was born in Austin, Texas. He has a weakness for Austin Tex-Mex cuisine and is a lifelong fan of the Texas Longhorns (hook 'em!); as a result, he may be heard humming the Texas fight song and/or Mariachi music at any given time of the day. He will occasionally break out of a hum and into a song, but these are rare events, usually occurring before early morning classes or while kicking back that ill-advised fourth refill of iced tea after that equally ill-advised final forkfull of combo plate at restaurants throughout Central and South Texas. On occasion he writes concisely. On occasion. But, as you can probably already tell, he prefers to write in a more gregarious, dare we say ambling style that comes naturally to most Texans of suspect taste for whom alliteration is as good as any puntuation mark and who feel that if you can't follow the tortuous path of their complete sentences then you probably don't belong at the campfire anyway. Whether this writerly condition is the result some psycho-social coping mechanism or is a physiological response to frequent high doses of caffeine and/or refried beans is a subject that should be debated, perhaps after the autopsy. Professor McNair declines to comment about an ongoing investigation, and is getting tired of referring to himself in the third person.

Professor McNair was not always "Professor" McNair; he was for many years just a student. He entered The University of Texas at Austin (hook 'em horns) in the fall of 1988 and after some brief interruptions he would eventually earn three degrees there. In 1990 he enlisted in the U.S. Army because it was a "great way to earn money for college." He no longer believes anything he hears on TV. Also in 1990 he met the lovely young woman who would become his wife. Alex and Anna were married in 1992. Alex served six years total in the Texas Army National Guard, five years in a mechanized infantry batallion of the 49th Armored Division and one uneventful year in a public affairs unit. While serving in an infantry unit he trained in Ft. Benning, Georgia and Ft. Hood, Texas. While training with a public affairs unit he served coffee. He completed his Bachelor of Arts with a double major in Spanish and Anthropology in 1993 and went on to graduate school in UT's renowned Department of Spanish and Portuguese, earning his Masters (1995) and Doctorate (1999) degrees in Hispanic Literature. Alex worked as a teaching assistant at UT for two years (1993-1995) and taught first- and second-year Spanish courses as an instructor in the department for another four years after that (fall 1995-summer 1999), managing in that time to edit his MA thesis, finish his Ph.D. coursework, study for comprehensive exams, then research, write, and edit his dissertation. After defending his doctoral dissertation in May of 1999 (August 1999 graduation), "Dr" McNair taught Spanish literature as a lecturer in UT's Department of Spanish and Portuguese for one academic year. In the summer of 2000 he and his family moved to Wisconsin to take an appointment as Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Modern Languages Department at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, which he began in the fall semester of 2000. And now he's official: he was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in the summer of 2005. The long apprenticeship is over; the real work has only just begun.

Professor McNair reads voraciously in all categories, has a penchant for Spanish poetry of the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, but prefers to organize his classes after the fashion of the Neoclassics and write with the tempered passion of a late Romantic. He has published his literary criticism in the form of essays and reviews in journals such as Hispanic Review, Romance Notes, Calíope: The Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, Explicator, Renaissance Quarterly, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association with work forthcoming in future volumes of Hispanófila and the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Current projects include booklength verse translations of Spanish poetry and an edition of early Spanish ballads.

In his "spare" time he helps Anna with their three boys (homework, sports, band, and scouts!). He sleeps only ocassionally on the weekends and during the summer months... and can be a really cantankerous crank without half a pot of coffee running through his veins by noon every day.