Christopher M. Curtis

Dr. Christopher Curtis is a Professor of History at Georgia Southern University and served as the inaugural Wexford Research Professor in 2025. He earned his PhD in history from Emory University, and he holds a Master’s degree from Virginia Tech and a Bachelors of Arts degree from the University of South Carolina as well. He served as the Vice Provost for Research at Georgia Southern from 2019 to 2024. Previously, Dr. Curtis managed the consolidation of Armstrong State University with Georgia Southern University in his capacity as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs and then as Vice President for the Armstrong and Liberty Campuses. He also served as the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and the Chair of the Department of History. Prior to coming to Savannah, he held both faculty and administrative positions at Claflin University and at Iowa State University. He began his teaching career as a high school teacher in Virginia. Before his career as an educator, he served as an Infantry Officer in the United States Marine Corps. He deployed as part of the advance expeditionary force to Panama as a platoon commander in 1988-1989 and served as part of an anti-terrorism security force based out of Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in Puerto Rico.  

Dr. Curtis was appointed as a representative on the South Carolina State Board of Archives by Governor Nikki Haley in 2010. He served as an expert witness on church property rights in The Episcopal Church v. Truro Church (2011). He has also served as the President of the St. George Tucker Society for Southern Studies (2013-2015), as a grant reviewer for the National Endowment of the Humanities and was a member of the editorial board of the Georgia Historical Quarterly(2016-2019).    

Dr. Curtis is the author of Jefferson’s Freeholders and the Politics of Ownership in the Old Dominion (Cambridge University Press: 2012) and of several articles and essays on early American law and political thought.  His publications include a contribution on the changing understandings of honor among judges in the edited collection, The Field of Honor: Essays on Southern Character and American Identity (University of South Carolina Press: 2017) and an essay in Social Roots: Reconnecting Lowcountry Foodways with the Landscape (University of Georgia Press, 2024) on the relationship between land tenure and food shortages in colonial Georgia. He is currently working on a book manuscript on the dispossession of the established church in the lands of the British empire.