Colin Robert Chase (5 February 1935 – 13 October 1984) was an American academic. An associate professor of English at the University of Toronto, he was known for his contributions to the studies of Old English and Anglo-Latin literature. His best-known work, The Dating of Beowulf, challenged the accepted orthodoxy of the dating of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, which had settled on a date in the latter half of the eighth century, and left behind what was described in A Beowulf Handbook as "a cautious and necessary incertitude".