Kris Erskine

Dr. Erskine was born and raised in the mountains of North Carolina and considers himself a Southern boy. But Erskine has spent much of his life outside the South after leaving for college. He spent three years as an undergraduate just outside London, England, and then spend a year teaching on a small island in the Marshall Islands, Micronesia. After getting his career started teaching high school in Upstate New York, Erskine and his wife Marla, and their two boys, Kellen and Ian, moved to Asia where Kris was both a teacher and vice-principal at an American School in Taipei, Taiwan. In 2007 the parent company of his school in Taiwan transferred Erskine to Hong Kong where he was tasked with opening and a new American high school, of which he was also the headmaster. During this period Erskine also acted as director of an English-language elementary school-within-a-school at Huamei International School, a Chinese-language K-12 school in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.

While living in Hong Kong Erskine completed his PhD at The University of Hong Kong in history, the history of Chinese-U.S. relations, primarily focusing on the 1930s and 1940s. In 2012 the Erskine family left Hong Kong and moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee where Kris began teaching full-time in the history department at Southern Adventist University, where he also was department chair in his final year. In 2017 Kris made the move back to high school education and into teacher education programs. While remaining in Chattanooga Kris was hired as the Chief Academic Officer for his old employer in China and oversaw the development of online programs, stand-alone campuses in China, and the recruiting and hiring of native English-speaking teachers.

Kris began teaching at Athens State University in 2019. He teaches in both the College of Education’s secondary program and the College of Arts and Science’s history department and loves being here.