My family, friends, colleagues, and students call me Chase.

At the heart of my work in higher education administration, I endeavor to inspire meaningful conversations and lead proactive engagements on student access, learning, and success. At the University of Utah, the work spans policy and practice, from Academic Advising to General Education and Faculty Success to Undergraduate Research - with the desire to see every student have an exceptional educational experience. My vision and the five goals of Undergraduate Studies can be viewed here.

My approach to student development and passion for student success initiatives emerged from a commitment to research-based, faculty development as well as academic training as a historian and wealth of experiences as a faculty member. My work at the University of Georgia saw me cultivating creative partnerships between the Division of Academic Enhancement and other entities across the University to enrich students’ learning experiences as well as enhancing the University’s national and international reputation for excellence in undergraduate and graduate education. In summer 2021, I brought those experiences, passion, and commitment for students' success to the University of Utah.

I completed my Ph.D. (May 2011) at UGA where I worked with my mentor, Allan Kulikoff. As a graduate student at the University, I participated in several formative programs–including the Workshop in Early American History and Culture, the Russell Library’s Forum for Civic Life in Georgia and the Graduate School’s Emerging Leaders Program. After commencement, I married the love of my life, Lori Prince Hagood, led study abroad trips to Cape Town, South Africa (summers of 2011 and 2012) with UGA, and relocated to Tifton, Georgia to begin my career in higher education as an Assistant Professor of History and Rural Studies at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College.

From fall 2011 to spring 2013, I taught several American history courses as well as an interdisciplinary, Rural Studies courses. Like most faculty, I served on various hiring and service committees, community outreach initiatives, and as both the history majors academic advisor and mentor to several student clubs and organizations. In my second year at Abraham Baldwin, I was appointed the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning and Faculty Development Coordinator–a position that permitted me to express my passion for teaching and for crafting student-centered learning experiences, faculty recognition programs, and realize my talents as an effective administrator within higher education. Lori and I were excited to return to UGA in fall 2013 when I became the Assistant Director for Faculty Development and Recognition in the Center for Teaching and Learning and she began her doctoral work in the Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education.

In fall 2016, I was privileged to take on the directorship of the Division of Academic Enhancement at UGA wherein I led programs, services, initiatives, and a curriculum that foster sustained student development and success in the University of Georgia’s largest student success unit. DAE is home to seven federally funded TRIO programs, an innovative UNIV curriculum and transdisciplinary faculty, multilayered academic success services including Peer Education, Academic Coaching, an Intensive English Program (an English language learning program), and cohort-based Scholars programs serving first-generation, low-income, and minoritized students. By my 2021 departure, the DAE had emerged the leading unit in student success at the University of Georgia.

My historical research explores nineteenth-century America and American identity formation with essays appearing in: The Southern Quarterly, Southern Spaces, The Journal of Backcountry Studies, The Alabama Review, Alabama Heritage, and more. Intrigued by the complexities of the South’s frontier period and driven by the lack of attention historians had paid to the early South (1780s-1830s), my doctoral research engaged the frontier South via the experiences of individuals “settling” Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Through their letters, diaries, maps, and theatrical plays, I followed these evolving southerners as their words, as much as their actions, echoed the making of southern identity far earlier than the ascendancy of King Cotton. Tentatively titled, Rewriting the Frontier: Making History in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, my first book project compels history enthusiasts and professional historians alike to reconsider the frontier experiences that confronted earlier southerners. Equally, I press readers to notice how the daily lives of early southerners influenced the distinctive features of the place Americans call “the South”. In print and in the classroom, I emphasize the importance of the individual in history as well as the cultural ideas and social norms that permeate and frame humans’ lives. Understanding how and why individuals embrace, challenge, or reject these ideas in their own lives–at any moment in history–is what makes the study of the past so empowering and significant.

A second scholarly area of research and publication includes teaching and learning as well as student success. Playing to Learn with Reacting to the Past: Research on High Impact, Active Learning Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) provides an evidence-base for the Reacting to the Past pedagogy–one of the most immersive of active learning strategies. In "Peer learning in STEM: a qualitative study of a student-oriented active learning intervention program," we explored how peer learning and teaching interactions in undergraduate STEM courses occurred through a “Peer-Learning Assistant” (PLA) model at a large, Research I institution. Other projects I’m currently developing include: essays on instructional innovation, student success, and the “crisis in the humanities”; two Reacting to the Past games; a biography of a bedeviled southern unionist and poet; and, a collection of African-American, memory-based narratives that explores black southerners’ individual lives, their collective experiences in ante/postbellum America, and a rethinking of how we teach topics like slavery and race in American higher education.