About
Chaz is a scholar of revolutions, race, religiosity, and interspecies history, including animals' roles in human societies. His research spans the sixteenth century through the twentieth century across Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America. [curriculum vitae]
History Workshop Journal, Past & Present, English Historical Review (forthcoming), Historical Journal, Atlantic Studies, Early American Studies, the Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies, and Sociales (Dominican Republic), among others, have published his articles. [read articles here] Chaz has contributed commentary to BBC News, Vice News, podcasts, and other media described below.
Siblings of Soil: Dominicans & Haitians in the Age of Revolutions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022), his first book, received Honorable Mention for the Duarte Prize from Latin American Studies Association Haiti & Dominican Republic Section in 2023. This book is built from extensive research in over two dozen archives in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Spain, the Vatican, the United Kingdom, and beyond. [read more here]
Chaz has undertaken several collaborations and equally co-authored projects with colleagues. For instance, research with Tyler D. Parry (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) examines dogs as biopower deployed to build extractive and state structures across the Americas. The Past & Present article from this project earned the Oxford University Press Journals "Best of History Selection" for 2020. Interviews regarding this research appeared in a 2021 investigative series by the Marshall Project, Indianapolis Star, AL.com, and Invisible Institute for which the journalists won a Pulitzer Prize.
Further, he is developing a project with Andrew Kettler (Kenyon College) that studies cattle as underrecognized agents of ecological change under empires and emergent modern economies. Cattle were also entwined referents in shifting labor, enslavement, and legal practices. The project considers their role in the establishment of an 'alimentary Atlantic' with economic, cultural, health, and environmental outcomes churning into the present.
He completed the project "Projections of Desire and Design on Early Modern Caribbean Maps" with Angela Sutton (Vanderbilt University), developed during a 2018 fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Their article analyzes the culturally-rich visual depictions of mythical monsters, animals, human hierarchies, resources, plantations, and unknown terrains in the initial centuries of European colonization in the Americas. Chaz co-edited the book Free Communities of Color and the Revolutionary Caribbean with Robert D. Taber (Fayetteville State University), which investigates how free people of African descent engaged religion, literature, politics, fashion, and the law toward upward mobility during the Age of Revolutions in Haiti, Caracas, Cartagena, Charleston, Jamaica, and the Dutch, Swedish, and French Caribbean.
His other articles have studied Black abolitionists in the United States, marronage and African ethnicities in the Caribbean, and pro-democracy exiles who challenged dictatorships in Latin America.
His work has been funded by the Ministry of Culture and Education of Spain, the Conference on Latin American History, the Bilinski Foundation, the Academy of American Franciscan History, the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, and the Harvard University Atlantic History Seminar, among others.
He has regularly presented research at venues such as the American Historical Association, Southern Historical Association, American Society for Environmental History, Omohundro Institute, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, and specialty conferences at King's College London, Duke University, Universidade de Lisboa, Rice University, University of Utah, Vanderbilt University, UCLA, Washington University of St. Louis, and beyond.
In 2024 he will serve as President of the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association for the annual conference in Kansas City.
Courses taught:
100 level- History of World Civilizations II; 20th Century World History
300 level- Caribbean History; Slavery in the Americas; Modern Revolutions; Age of Revolutions; Atlantic World; Colonial Latin America
400, 500, and 600 levels- Atlantic World; Age of Revolutions; Atlantic Slavery; Race in the Americas; Revolutionary Atlantic