Christopher L Salter

Christopher "Kit" Salter did his undergraduate work at Oberlin College, with a major in Geography and Geology. He spent three years teaching English at a Chinese university in Taiwan immediately following Oberlin. Graduate work for both the M.A. and the Ph.D. was done at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at UCLA from 1968 to 1987, when he took on fulltime employment with the National Geographic Society in Washington with his wife, Cathy. They were both involved in the Society's...See more

Christopher "Kit" Salter did his undergraduate work at Oberlin College, with a major in Geography and Geology. He spent three years teaching English at a Chinese university in Taiwan immediately following Oberlin. Graduate work for both the M.A. and the Ph.D. was done at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at UCLA from 1968 to 1987, when he took on fulltime employment with the National Geographic Society in Washington with his wife, Cathy. They were both involved in the Society's campaign to bring geography back into the American school system. Kit has been professor and chair of the Department of Geography at the University of Missouri, Columbia since moving to the heartland in 1988. Themes that have made Salter glad he choose geography as a life field include landscape study and interpretation in both domestic and foreign settings; landscape study and literature to show students that geography occurs in all writing, not just in textbooks; and geography education to help learners at all levels see the critical nature of geographic issues. He has written more than 125 articles in various aspects of geography; has traveled to a lot of the places that he writes about in his text; and has been wise enough to have a son who is an architect in Los Angeles; a daughter who is a teacher in San Francisco Bay Area; and a neat wife who is a writer in the heart of the heartland in Breakfast Creek, Missouri. See less