Born and raised in Kaneohe, Hawaii, Assistant Professor of English Language & Literature Melissa Parrish grew up wanting to be a marine biologist, fascinated by the marine life around her. After spending a day with her mother’s marine biologist friend, Parrish realized that life was not for her, and instead “went for the thing she loved most — books and reading.”
“When I was a kid [literature] felt really real and alive. It made me happy to read beautiful language and beautiful stories,” said Parrish. “As I got older, I started to think of literature as a place where I could dwell in problems that I didn’t understand.”
Her love of literature remained constant throughout her early life, leading her to want to study far from home: a place, she joked, where she could “experience all four seasons.”
“Growing up on a small island, I always knew I wanted to branch out and I always knew I wanted to study literature,” said Parrish. “It was really important to me, even though I love my home state, to experience a world outside of island life.”
In the late ’90s, as her time in high school drew to a close, she found herself searching for an opportunity to go to a college far away.
“My parents were really big into the idea of me going into the military [to pay for school],” she said. Her parents thought the military would just “be a career that would help [her] pay for college and allow [her] to see the world.” But, following 9/11, which happened during her senior year at West Point, her military career became far different than originally anticipated.
Suddenly, Parrish, a young scholar of literature, was now a “parachute rigger” as America became engaged in two wars by 2003.
“I would sit in an aircraft hanger for hours and hours […] just waiting to jump out of planes and make sure that our parachutes were working,” she said. “But, I always had a book of essays in my pocket. So there was a way in which I was still really thinking about literature the entire time even though I was in a uniform.”
She remarked that her time in the military was “really special” to her on a personal level. “It’s very much in the past now […] but I refer back to my time in the military as this touchstone for trying to remind myself of the world outside of academia from which I came.”
To remind her of that time, Parrish keeps a picture of her and her military friends on her bookshelf in her office, alongside a miniature cargo delivery system, a gift made by her colleagues before she left.
After her time in the military, Parrish received her master’s at Georgetown in 2009, continuing her desire to study far from Hawaii. Afterward, she ventured to Boston, teaching ROTC at Boston College. She rejoined the military after her time at Boston College, applying to Ph.D. programs while in Kuwait. She received her Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University in 2020.
“[Academia] is truly my second career […] I wouldn’t trade any of it. I learned a lot. I matured a lot. I think I have some general skills and resilience just from having bounced around a lot of places.”
Parrish joined the Smith College faculty in 2021 as a member of the English Language & Literature Department. She hopes to use her varied life experiences prior to her work at Smith to inform her teaching and research.
“My research tends to have an autobiographical piece to it and reflects on my time in the military,” said Parrish.
“The research I do is super important, but I also always want to keep in mind: who am I doing this for? […] My research is about being critical of a history of national security poets have been critical of for a long time. When I think about that and write my research about it I think a lot about who I served with, too. […] I use that to keep myself grounded.”
She reminds students that “having a less than clean trajectory to wherever it is you want to be is not only okay, but maybe a good thing.”
