Associate professor Joel Christenson is the director of the John A. Adams ’71 Center for Military History and Strategic Analysis. Prior to joining the VMI faculty, he served as the senior historian in the Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), where he worked on the Secretaries of Defense Historical Series and coordinated long-term historical research and publishing. Before joining OSD, he worked in the Policy Studies Division of the Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. He holds a Ph.D. in American history from West Virginia University, where his research examined the origins of U.S. naval and military advising in Latin America.

Prior to his doctoral work, Christenson worked as a senior defense analyst for the U.S. Government Accountability Office, and as a research assistant at the Institute for Defense Analyses. He is a distinguished graduate of VMI, class of 1999, and holds master’s degrees from the University of Kentucky and George Mason University, as well as a Command and Staff Diploma from the U.S. Naval War College.