A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
A headshot of SAIC faculty member W. Douglas

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W Douglas

Associate Professor, Adjunct

Contact

Bio

Adjunct Associate Professor, Liberal Arts (1987). BA, BS, 1968, University of Cincinnati; MA, 1970, and PhD, 1974, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Concurrent position: Dean of Student Affairs/Assistant Professor of History, University of Illinois at Chicago. Awards: Organization of American States Fellowship for Research Abroad.

Personal Statement

Professor Douglas has served as the Dean of Students and Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His academic specialty is Latin American history. Upon retirement from that institution a room in the then Office of the Academic Center of Excellence was named in his honor (The Collaboration Room). He is currently an Associate Adjunct Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago teaching courses in Latin American history.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

A variety of specific historical studies are offered on a rotating basis. Recent offerings have included The Limits of Reason, a study of European Enlightenment; Sex, Booze, and Baseball, the nature of leisure activities in American cultural life; Space, Heaven, and God, a study of the relationships of religion, astronomy, and cosmology; and War in American History.

Class Number

1732

Credits

3

Description

This course is an introduction to the history of Latin America in and part of the modern world from the independence movements of the 1810s to the present. The course is organized thematically as well as chronologically. We will cover political and economic regimes and transformations, as well as social and cultural movements, and will travel from the deserts of the US-Mexico border to the Amazon rainforest and the glacial archipelago of Patagonia. Source materials will include everything from revolutionary priests to tango celebrities and some of the world?s first female heads of state. By the end of the course, we will have worked through a history of Latin America on its own terms, but also within a modernizing world.

Class Number

1797

Credits

3