Douglas Chalmers is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Columbia University.  He has taught at Columbia since 1966, including the Contemporary Civilization course in the Core Curriculum since 1984.  He has also taught at Swarthmore and Rutgers, as well as holding visiting professor appointments at several universities in Latin America and Europe.  He has a B.A. from Bowdoin College and a Ph.D. from Yale University.

Professor Chalmers had been Chair of the Department of Political Science, Acting Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, and Director of the Institute for Latin American Studies before retiring in 2005.  

He is currently Executive Director of the Society of Senior Scholars, President of EPIC (Emeritus Professors in Columbia), and Special Assistant to the Provost for Faculty Retirement. 

He is the author of The Social Democratic Party of Germany (1964), co-editor of The Right and Democracy in Latin America (1992), author and co-editor of The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America (1997), as well as articles, papers and presentations on political and civil society structures. He co-edited Problems Confronting Contemporary Democracies: Essays in Honor of Alfred Stepan (2012, Notre Dame University Press) and is the author of Reforming Democracies: Six Facts About Politics That Demand a New Agenda (2012, Columbia University Press), based on his 2007 Schopf Lectures at Columbia.

He and his wife reside in an apartment in Morningside Heights and weekend in Columbia County, NY.