Cris Culton Wants You To Rethink History
Ryleigh Johnson | September 9, 2025
Visiting associate professor of history Cris Culton poses for a photo in front of Jensen Hall in Swannanoa, N.C. (Vivian Bryan)
From the beginning of their journey with higher education, Warren Wilson College’s (WWC) visiting associate professor of history, Cris Culton, knew that they wanted to teach history in a college setting.
“I'm one of the few people that has never changed my major,” Culton said.
A childhood spent in Venice, California and Mexico, along with a year-long study abroad experience in Spain, made a deep impression upon Culton. They describe themself as having three educations: their formal education through high school and college, the education they gained through travelling and a formative experience working in restaurants in L.A. over the course of five years.
“I worked alongside all undocumented people...” Culton said. “For five years, I got to know these people who became my friends, and I got to learn about their lives and about how difficult it is to be undocumented in this country. Hearing their stories really prompted me to be like…‘Wait a second, we need to do something about this.’ And that's when I was like, ‘Okay, I need to study history to understand why we have an immigration crisis constantly, everywhere.’”
Culton’s journey to answering this question began at a community college in L.A. before later transferring to the University of California, Santa Cruz. After graduating from their undergraduate program, Culton applied to graduate schools.
“The only place I got accepted was Duke University,” Culton said. “I had never been to North Carolina. I didn't know anything about Duke University, and all I read was that there was a big forest…and I was like, ‘Yes, I get to continue to live in the forest!’ It wasn't quite what I thought. Duke University is an amazing place in many ways…but Duke is not the liberal arts fantasy that I may have wanted it to be.”
So far, Culton has found WWC to be a better match for their interests, both academic and personal. To them, WWC’s focus on storytelling enables a rigorous and lively teaching of history.
“Warren Wilson and I have such a great relationship because Warren Wilson College is all about telling stories…that's what history is,” Culton said. “History is not objective. This is the big untruth that we've been told: that there is an objective fact of the past. No, everything needs to be interpreted. History is actually a subjective practice.”
Along with this increased focus on the interpretive aspects of history, Culton wants to help reshape how students think about the field of history itself.
“High school history education is this memorization of dates and names and glorification of individuals, and I think history is completely different than that,” Culton said. “The classes that I teach...are designed for us to understand how the world works: structural violence, systems of exploitation...I think if we can understand how all of these structures have come to be, we can do something about the structures that are still with us today.”
Though they particularly love history, Culton is excited to connect with students over a variety of topics. Their interests extend from zine making and hiking to creative writing and being a self-proclaimed “nerd about how sound travels.”
“My door is open...” Culton said. “Let's talk about history and honestly, not even just history, [but] literature, philosophy, I'm down. I'm a very approachable person. Even if you're not my student, I would love to hear from you, hear your stories…I think that history is the type of study that enables you to be able to study all these other things with even more power. I would love to meet you no matter what.”
Culton’s position as a visiting history professor is a temporary one, lasting only for the 2025-26 academic year. WWC plans to open a nationwide search for a permanent faculty member of the history department in the spring, and Culton hopes that this will become a pathway for them to continue teaching at the school.
“This is a one-year visiting assistant [professor] position, and it would genuinely break my heart if it stayed that way,” Culton said. “This is a place where I genuinely am going to give it [my] all...I don't know how I could ever find another place that's this perfect. I’m committed.”