Geography and the Environment

William Doolittle
Professor
Erich W. Zimmermann Regents Professor of Geography

Education: Ph.D. , Professor Doolittle received his Ph.D. in 1979 from the University of Oklahoma. He taught at Mississippi State University before joining the UT faculty in 1981, and served as undergraduate advisor, graduate advisor (receiving UT's Outstanding Graduate Advisor Award in 2004), and department chair. He was a visiting professor at Brown University in 1997, and a Fulbright Senior Specialist at Stockholm University in 2007. He is a Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has received distinguish scholarship awards from the Association of American Geographers and the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers.
Area(s): Landscape Ecology and Biogeography; Environmental Resource Management; Geographic Information Science
Courses Taught:
Professor Doolittle regularly teaches courses on the Landscapes of Mexico and Caribbean America, the historical geography of the American Southwest, Field Techniques, and ecologically sustainable and indigenously developed agricultural strategies.

Research Interests:
Professor Doolittle's research interests include landscapes, histories, and agricultural technologies in arid lands, particularly the American Southwest and Mexico. He is actively engaged with three long-term projects: "Forests to Fields," monitoring environmental and land use change associated with agriculture in the northwest Mexico; "Bridging Troubled Waters," investigating the transfer of knowledge pertaining to water control from Renaissance Spain to Viceregal Mexico, and the merger of these technologies with those developed indigenously; and "EarthShapers," developing theories of landscape evolution involving the agency and import of individuals.

Selected Publications:
Professor Doolittle is author of more than 70 publications including four books. The Safford Valley Grids: Prehistoric Cultivation in the Southern Arizona Desert (2004), Cultivated Landscapes of Native North America (2000), Canal Irrigation in Prehistoric Mexico: The Sequence of Technological Change (1990) , and Prehistoric Occupance in the Valley of Sonora: Archaeological Confirmation of Early Spanish Reports (1988).