In Memoriam Philip Soergel

In Memoriam Philip Soergel (1959 - 2026)

The Department of History is devastated by the sudden loss of our colleague, Philip Soergel, who passed away on January 7, 2026. Phil joined our department in 2005 as an associate professor, became full professor in 2012, and served as chair of the department for a decade until 2022. Phil received his Ph.D. in medieval and early modern European history from the University of Michigan in 1988. Before joining us at the University of Maryland, he was a member of the Department of History at Arizona State University in Tempe from 1989 to 2005. He is the author of Wondrous in His Saints: Counter Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (California, 1993) and Miracles and the Protestant Imagination (Oxford, 2012). 

He was also a co-editor of the Routledge series Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World. He received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society. He was a former member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, had been a fellow of the Duke August Library in Wolfenbuttel, Germany, and served twice as a visiting professor at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. 

Phil was an exceptionally wide-ranging scholar whose interests included literature, music, art history, and the study of gender and sexuality; the Italian and Northern European Renaissances; the medieval and early modern church and lay religion; and both the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation. Forever a fan of Martin Luther, in his later years, he was researching the continued cultural and social legacy of Lutheran church music.

Read Phil's full obituary here.

In 2013, Stefano Villani conducted the following interview with Philip Soergel at the request of Maria Crăciun for Colloquia, a Romanian academic journal devoted to the history of religions and to interdisciplinary discussion in the humanities, published under the auspices of the Department of History and Philosophy of Religions at Babeș-Bolyai University. The interview was part of a broader project devoted to conversations with leading scholars in the field of religious history. Although it was completed and submitted for publication, it never appeared in print. Shortly afterward, Maria Crăciun was no longer able to oversee the journal’s activities, and Colloquia eventually ceased publication. The interview therefore remained unpublished for more than a decade. Following Philip Soergel’s death in early 2026, it is now being made available here for the first time, both as a tribute to his scholarship and as a record of his reflections on historiography, religion, intellectual history, and the craft of writing history. Read the complete interview of Philip here.