Dr. Doug Sullivan-Gonzalez is the Interim Chair of History and a Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Mississippi.
Research Interests
Dr. Doug Sullivan-Gonzalez currently focuses on the role of religion and religiosity in 19th and 20th century Guatemala. Dr. Sullivan-Gonzalez has recently published on the history of Liberation Theology in Latin American.
Biography
Dr. Sullivan-González completed his Bachelor of Arts with Honors at Samford University and his Master of Divinity and Master of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. He taught Church History and Social Ethics from 1984-1986 at the Nicaraguan Baptist Seminary in Managua, Nicaragua, and completed his Phd in Latin American History at The University of Texas at Austin. He initiated his teaching career at UM as Assistant Professor in 1993, and then taught at Tulane University as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History from 1999-2000 Sullivan-González served as Dean of the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College from 2003-2021 and returned to the Department of History as Professor of History in 2021.
Publications
Religion and Identity in Guatemala
From the publisher:
In The Black Christ of Esquipulas, Douglass Sullivan-González explores the multifaceted appeal of this famous shrine, its mysterious changes in color over the centuries, and its deeper significance in the spiritual and political lives of Guatemalans. Reconstructed from letters buried within the restricted Catholic Church archive in Guatemala City, the debates surrounding the shrine reflect the shifting categories of race and ethnicity throughout the course of the country’s political trajectory. This “biography” of the Black Christ of Esquipulas serves as an alternative history of Guatemala and sheds light on some of the most salient themes in Guatemala’s social and political history: state formation, interethnic dynamics, and church-state tensions. Sullivan-González’s study provides a holistic understanding of the relevance of faith and ritual to the social and political history of this influential region.
Selected Book(s):
Piety, Power, and Politics: Religion and Nation Formation in Guatemala, 1821-1871, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.
Selected Article(s):
“History of Liberation Theology in Latin America,” Oxford University Research Encyclopedia on Latin America, 2022.
Dr. Sullivan-González also translated Edelberto Torres-Rivas’s Interpretación del desarrollo social centroamericano as History and Society in Central America in 1993 and he co-edited a manuscript with Charles Reagan Wilson on The South and the Caribbean, published by The University of Mississippi Press in 2001.
Courses Taught
- HIST 3620 History of Mexico and Central America
- HIST 3660 Race and Ethnicity in Latin America
- HIST 3670 Social Revolutions in Latin America
- HIST 4980 Undergrad Research Seminar in History
- INST 1010 Introduction to International Studies
- INST 2070 Latin American Studies
- SPAN 1012 Elementary Spanish II
- SPAN 1110 Intensive Elementary Spanish
- SPAN 2011 Intermediate Spanish I
- SPAN 2110 Intensive Intermediate Spanish
Education
MDV Divinity, Princeton Theological Seminary (1982)
M.A. Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary (1983)
Ph.D. History, The University of Texas at Austin (1994)