Thomas W. Krise

Thomas W. Krise, Ph.D., (born 1961) is the 13th President of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, United States. He was appointed June 1, 2012. He also holds a full professorship in the Department of English.

Krise graduated in 1979 from All Saints Cathedral School on St Thomas, Virgin Islands. He earned a B.S. in history from the Air Force Academy, an M.S.A. in management from Central Michigan University, an M.A. in English from the University of Minnesota, and a Ph.D. in English in 1995 from the University of Chicago. He served more than twenty years on active duty in the U.S. Air Force, retiring with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He served on the faculty of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, as a Senior Military Fellow of the Institute for National Strategic Studies in Washington, as Vice Director of the National Defense University Press, as founder and first Director of the Air Force Humanities Institute, and as a flight commander in the Strategic Air Command.

Formerly, he was Dean of the College of the Pacific, the arts and sciences college of the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

Krise is President of the Early Caribbean Society, past President of the Society of Early Americanists, and a former Fulbright Scholar at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. He has served as General Editor of the McNair Papers monograph series, Managing Editor of War, Literature, and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities, and published numerous articles and other works, including Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies, 1657-1777.