Changing up styles, making progress on a book: Maryville College’s Dr. Doug Sofer continues to keep it ‘Weird’
March 6, 2025
There is, at Maryville College, an expectation of excellence when it comes to the education students will receive.
The faculty members who provide it rise to the occasion, year in and year out. Their classroom commitment is steadfast, but it’s only part of the work that they do. They’re scholars as much as they are teachers, and their work outside of the classroom not only provides intellectual stimulation of the things they teach within it, it also enhances the reputation of MC as a place of academic rigor, populated by educators who routinely submit work to publications across the academic spectrum.
Throughout the course of the 2024-25 academic year, a number of Maryville College faculty members have been recognized for their contributions to academia. This is part six of a six-part series spotlighting those individuals and their accomplishments.
Dr. Doug Sofer
For those struggling to understand the strange times they find themselves living in, Dr. Doug Sofer — also a professor of history at Maryville College — might be able to help.
After all, that’s what his podcast/blog/book project, “You Are a Weirdo,” is designed to do. The most recent headlines notwithstanding, the “strangeness of now” can be understood through the lens of history, Sofer said, and listeners apparently agree: The podcast has a 4.9 star rating on Apple Podcasts, and it’s in the top 5% of podcasts globally.
“I’m very grateful that listeners’ responses have been very positive,” he said. “I’m not sure what I expected when I put these different episodes out. I can say that on one hand, I know I put a lot of effort into each one, and on the other hand, I know that I can also give you detailed reasons why each one is also flawed in some way. Even so, as with a lot of different online media, sometimes ’the only good podcast episode is a finished podcast episode.’ I try not to allow perfect to be the enemy of the good, as the cliché goes.”
While the number of podcasts out there on the internet is estimated to be somewhere around 4 million, it’s notable then that “You Are a Weirdo” manages to break the surface of attention among Sofer’s peers. He recently fielded a request from a “humanities-based project” at the University of Pittsburgh to interview the program’s director, and that particular ask led him to change up a few things.
“Recently, I’ve been doing interview-based episodes, and that episode is when I realized that I needed to up my game when it came to doing that kind of show,” he said. “Up until then, all my shows were scripted and more like a presentation to a general public audience than like a conversation. So I interviewed my next-door office neighbor here, (History Professor Dr.) Aaron Astor, and that one was a lot of fun, and it helped me think through how to handle the audio challenges of going somewhere else with a mic setup.
“Once I had that under my belt, I interviewed an entire audience of historians at the annual meeting of the Southeast World History Association (SEWHA). I’ve worked with SEWHA before, and I’m actually a past president of the organization, but it was still pretty terrifying taking my silly show to a few dozen professionals in my field.”
In the meantime, he continues to make progress on his book project, which is tied to both the podcast and the blog. He completed a draft last year, and now he’s using his other two platforms to generate enthusiasm for what he deems as a “somewhat goofy but definitely important project.” Because everyone, from fellow academics to the weirdos among whom he gleefully counts himself to more conventional groups like journalists and writers, could use a little context to understand the “strangeness of now.”
“I guess if I’ve got one big message these days, it’s that how we know what we know about the past is among the most important questions of our day,” he said. “People tell you stuff about the past all the time. Anytime a media person or politician or celebrity says things like ’This is the worst economic collapse ever,’ or ’The founders of our country would be horrified to imagine so-and-so happening,’ or ’Some institution or technology is unprecedented’ — these are all historical arguments that can be verified one way or another.
“Knowing how to do so requires understanding how historians do our work. My project’s emphasis on ’the strangeness of now’ is one way of demonstrating how our craft functions.”