Charles A. Perkins

Dr. Charles Albert Perkins held the PhD from Johns Hopkins when President Dabney recruited him to UT in 1892 as associate professor of physics and electricity. He was chair of the Engineering Department when it was a department within the College of Liberal Arts (now Arts and Sciences) and is said to have declined the deanship in favor of Dr. Charles Ferris when engineering was made a college in 1913. He also served as a member of the faculty of the Department of Pharmacy in the late 1890s and served as the first director of UT’s Engineering Experiment Station. He taught at UT for more than 50 years, continuing to teach until he was well over 80. He was the author of a widely used textbook in electrical engineering. At the opening of the first UT library building, Carnegie Library, in 1911, Perkins presented the institution with a marble bust of Dante that he had acquired on a trip to Italy the previous summer. Dr. Perkins’s wife, Angie Warren Perkins, was UT’s first dean of women.