“I’ve always just loved to read,” said American literature professor Richard Millington. “Getting absorbed in books was this big pleasure… My interest was always in literature.” He’s not kidding. Millington’s office is covered in books — stacked and scattered across almost every flat surface.
Like his office, Millington is brimming with literary knowledge and scholarly passion. He grew up in a suburb in Milwaukee, and his introduction to the world of academia was through his father, a botany professor at Marquette University.
“It did mean that when we went on vacation, he would be on his hands and knees, looking at some kind of plant or toad,” Millington said, laughing. “I guess I knew of the academic world, but not necessarily the literary version of it.”
Millington’s love for reading, he explained, was passed down from his mother — a stay-at-home mom and a member of the Wisconsin Civil Liberties Union — and developed throughout his early education.
“I continued to like English as a subject all through junior high and high school. I wrote for the school newspaper, I did debate and I went to college with vague ideas of journalism — definitely something reading-and-writing connected,” said Millington. But in college, he became aware of other options. “I think it was really in college that I started to see being a professor as something you could do for a career,” he added.
Millington became interested in academia as an undergraduate at Harvard University. He studied history and literature but didn’t discover his interest in early American literature until later on.
“This is kind of a confession,” he laughed. “When I was an undergraduate, I didn’t take any American literature classes.”
After graduating from Harvard in 1975, Millington took a year off to work at a bookstore in Cambridge and travel. The following year, he applied to both graduate school and law school at Yale University.
“Given the job market, an academic career seemed more like a long shot,” said Millington. “I wasn’t sure which I would do, but I got into graduate school with a fellowship, which made it look doable, economically.”
Millington’s interest in early American literature sparked in his graduate school courses, when he took a class with the now-president of Duke University, Richard Brodhead.
“Originally, my dissertation was going to be all of these writers — like, Hawthorne and Melville and Howells — and it ended up just being about Hawthorne,” he said. “So I became a Hawthorne scholar, coming out of grad school.”
After graduating from Harvard, Millington turned his dissertation into a book, titled “Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne’s Fiction.” Though Millington credits that book to accelerating his scholarly career, he is most proud of his recent work on author Willa Cather, about whom he is currently teaching a seminar. He explains that he enjoyed adding to the criticism already written on Cather and exploring the anthropological nature of her work. This, he says, is a throughline in the various authors he enjoys researching and writing about.
“I think I’m interested in writers who are themselves interested in how a culture puts itself together and makes meaning,” he explained. “To question the prevailing forms of meaning in a culture… My form of creativity is kind of a responsive form. I really do love to interpret literary texts and capture what I think is thrilling or interesting about the ambitions of a writer that I admire.”
Despite his passion for the researching and writing side of academia, Millington prioritizes his teaching and professorial work.
“For me, the profession always made sense in terms of teaching,” said Millington. “I think my sense of identity is probably ‘teacher first, scholar second.’” This is something that he feels that Smith supports and promotes. “The great thing about working at a place like Smith is that the two go together really well. You’re expected to both care about teaching and to have a really rich scholarly life,” he explained.
Millington described the concept of a liberal arts school as nothing short of miraculous. He relates it to his recent research on leisure in American culture.
“Even though everybody’s working hard, [college] is this exploratory place we go,” he said. “It still seems amazing to me that our very pragmatic culture sets aside four years for a lot of young people to do this exploring.”
Though this year will be Millington’s last year before retirement, he has relished teaching at Smith.
“This is my 39th year at Smith, which is kind of amazing,” Millington said. “I guess my short summation is — the students have never been more diverse or talented than they are now… Those moments when your students are saying things that surprise you, that sense of doing something together that’s producing insights around the room. I think it’s probably the most exciting thing.”
