Dr. Chad Berry most recently served as the Academic Vice President and Dean of the Faculty for eight years after serving for five years as Director of the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center. During that five years he also served one year as Director of the Center for Excellence in Learning through Service. Prior to coming to Berea in 2006, he was a member of the faculty at Maryville College.

Dr. Berry has authored, edited, or co-edited four books. He is the author of Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles, published by the University of Illinois Press, which examines the migration of millions of white southerners to the Midwest during the twentieth century. The book was inspired by his paternal grandparents, who reluctantly left Tennessee in the 1940s, going first to Akron, Ohio, and ultimately settling in Mishawaka, Indiana, where they found jobs and the economic opportunity that had eluded them in the South. He is the editor of and a contributor to The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance (Illinois, 2008), an important radio program from Chicago that was instrumental in the development of country music. The book is a companion volume to a PBS documentary of the same name. He is the co-editor, with Deandra Little and Peter Felten, of Looking and Learning: Visual Literacy across the Disciplines, a volume of New Directions in Teaching and Learning from Jossey-Bass, published in 2015. He also is the co-editor, with Phillip J. Obermiller and Shaunna L. Scott, of Studying Appalachian Studies: Making the Path by Walking, published in 2015 by the University of Illinois Press. Southern Spaces has done a feature on the new book, and it was the winner of the 2015 Weatherford Award for nonfiction.

Having visited more than 45 countries, Dr. Berry enjoys taking students on international study trips, including destinations such as Cuba, China, and countries in Africa. In 2005, the East Tennessee Historical Society awarded him its Teaching Excellence Award. In 2014, he received the MOSAIIC (Multicultural Opportunities, Strategies, and Institutional Inclusiveness Conference) Award from the Central Kentucky Diversity Consortium.

A member of Phi Beta Kappa, he was the 2006-2007 president of the Appalachian Studies Association. He continues to work on a project analyzing maps that Berea students drew of their home communities between 1948 and the late 1960s for a general studies class; work on the latter can be viewed at www.mappalachia.org. He is a board member of the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation and is a former board member of the Hindman Settlement School and the Pine Mountain Settlement School. He also serves on the Press Board of the University Press of Kentucky.