Who the heck is Doug Sofer? – Find Yourself in History

I the heck am Doug Sofer.

I’m a professional historian on a mission to demonstrate to Planet Earth¹ how doing history actually works.

That mission is what drives me. It gets me going in the morning, it keeps me fired up even when a big lunch betrays me and tries to make me sleepy. It sometimes even keeps me up at night. That’s because we’re all basically screwed without real history.²

And real history is a process. It’s about interpreting the past through evidence.

Photo of Doug Sofer — Face, neck, shoulders, door, and three blurry acoustic tiles of Doug Sofer, Ph.D.

How we know about the past is even more important than what we know.

Most folks get that if we don’t understand the lessons of our forefathers, foremothers, and various other forefamily and forefriends, we’re in fore a world of hurt. What’s less understood is that how we know about the past is even more important than what we know.

If I’m doing my job well—which is always possible—you’ll understand the process of history a little better when you check out the stuff on this site. Pretty much everything here—the podcast, the blog, the book project—are my best shot at communicating my mission to you.

If I’m qualified to take on this task—which is always possible—it’s because I’m blessed enough to have a few things going for me. For starters, I’ve got some cool credentials. I hold³ a doctorate in history from the University of Texas at Austin. My major field in grad school was the history of Latin America and I won a Fulbright Fellowship to live for a year in Bogotá, Colombia, where I did my dissertation research. My minor grad field was modern Africa, and I also picked up an additional teaching field in U.S. history. These days I’m also a practitioner of world history—the broadest, longest-haul, biggest-picture, camera-zoomed-so-far-back-that-your-viewfinder-leaves-a-red-mark-around-your-eye kind of history. I even served as president of the group that represents world historians in the Southeast U.S.A., SEWHA.

Most of my actual experience talking about history comes from my main gig as a tenured history prof—just one of four professing peeps in my history department—at lovely Maryville College. MC is right next to the splendid Smoky Mountains in the magnificent Appalachian region of magical East Tennessee.⁴ When you’re 25% of a history department, you teach a lot of different kinds of courses. Many of the historical places, periods, and subjects that I teach, fall outside of the specific content areas that I studied in grad school.

That broad, fisheye focus can be tricky sometimes; having my history brain stretched out in so many different directions made it harder to write a specialized book⁵ in my specialized field designed for a specialized audience of specialized historians and published by a specialized academic publisher specializing in such things.

Even though writing such a book would have been special, all that aforementioned history-brain-stretching-out has also been an advantage. Over the past couple of decades, I’ve embraced my breadth of scope, taking on new courses, reading far outside of my field and turning myself into a historical jack of all trades.⁶

And that’s the short version⁷ of who the heck am I. It’s why the heck I’ve gone all-in on this unconventional multimedia project. And to whoever the heck are you, if I’m achieving what I set out to do—which is always possible—you’ll enjoy yourself a bit while you’re here. More important, you’ll be more confident to explore the past on your own, to make a little more sense of the strange world of today.

— Doug

1
Or, more precisely, to the people on Planet Earth. I do not yet know how to communicate about the virtues of history to, for example, giant aquatic isopods (Bathynomus giganteus). If you’ve got suggestions on how to do that, drop me a line.
2
I’ve got a lot to say on this topic but I’m trying to keep this bio page positive. If you pay attention to what I’m trying to convey on this site, though, you’ll notice many implied doomsday scenarios peppered throughout.
3
I’m not actually holding it right now; it’s in a frame on my office wall.
4
A couple more sentences like that one and I’ll be able to add Slinger of Unnecessary Adjectives to my LinkedIn profile.
5
The cool word for that kind of book is “monograph.”
6
I just learned from the New Oxford American Dictionary that lives on my Mac that the word jack in this expression originally comes from the name Jack as a generic name for Some Dude, but then eventually it came to mean assistant—as in “I need to hire some dude named, for example, Jack, to help me sand down these barrel staves,” and at that point a jack of all trades came to mean some assistant dude named for example Jack who can assist all kinds of different craftspeople. Learning about the historical origin of words is fun and uplifting! And speaking of uplifting, jack in the sense of a device that lifts up your car basically refers to some guy named for example Jack who is your assistant and is freakishly strong and therefore singlehandedly able to hoist an automobile. You’re welcome.
7
Okay: the medium-length version.