Douglass Sullivan-González completed his Bachelor of Arts at Samford University and his Master of Divinity and Master of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Sullivan-González taught Church History and Social Ethics from 1984-1986 at the Nicaraguan Baptist Seminary in Managua, Nicaragua. He then completed his Ph.D. in Latin American History at the University of Texas at Austin. His research and dissertation, supported by a Fulbright-Hays dissertation award, focused on the role of priests and parishioners during the formation of the Guatemalan nation, 1839-1871. Pittsburgh Press published in 1998 the revised manuscript as Piety, Power, and Politics. Religion and Nation Formation in Guatemala, 1821-1871.

Sullivan-González also translated Edelberto Torres-Rivas’s Interpretación del desarrollo social centroamericano as History and Society in Central America (1993). His co-edited manuscript, with Charles Reagan Wilson, on The South and the Caribbean was published by the University of Mississippi Press in 2001.