About Head Coach Alex Werrell

A graduate of Porter-Gaud School, Alex Werrell studied literature, art history, and German at Yale, where he earned both his BA and MA in English. Despite being a Latin dropout, Alex worked at the ancient art department at the Yale University Art Gallery, where he researched and wrote gallery texts for Yale's extensive ancient Mediterranean collection, including several installations of the art and artifacts from Yale's expeditions in what are today Syria and Jordan. The strangeness of those digs—exhuming cities swallowed both by sand and by time—inspired Alex's graduate work on disrupted temporalities in the works of Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and Eudora Welty. As an extension of that writing, Alex continues to study the lingering time of slavery in the art, architecture, botany, and literature of Charleston and Jamaica.

When not chasing after Miss Otis, a particularly stubborn English Bull Terrier, Alex enjoys listening to opera and serves as a fellow of Timothy Dwight College at Yale, where he advises first-year students and assists seniors with their theses, and as assistant librarian and editor at the university's Elizabethan Club, where he works with folios, quartos, and other treasures from Shakespeare's era.

Prior to joining the English faculty at Taft, Alex taught art history in Rome and worked for seven years at Hopkins School in New Haven, where he taught courses on Shakespeare, Southern literature, Romantic poetry, writing, and more; coached tennis and debate; and enjoyed leading student trips locally and internationally. Outside of the classrooms at Taft, Alex will assist in the theater programs and coach tennis.

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