Noel Smyth, Vassar’s newest tenure-track history professor, has always loved stories. He began his academic career hoping to write fiction. Now, he teaches about the stories of people who were previously ignored by history.
After teaching part-time at colleges along the central coast of California, Smyth accepted a tenure-track position as an Assistant History Professor at Vassar. Specializing in American history, Smyth tries to bring underrepresented perspectives on the subject into the classroom to paint a fuller picture of the past. He is currently teaching two fall semester courses: HIST-274 “Early America, 1500–1750” and HIST-366 “Transatlantic Encounters: Indigenous Histories of the Gulf South and the Greater Caribbean.”
“The thing I like about history is telling the truth about the past,” said Smyth. “I am interested in marginalized people and the history of people that have been voiceless or not spoken about in history very often, partly because of my own upbringing and partly because of the world I see around me. It is a way of getting justice.”
Smyth began his studies at the University of Iowa, where he majored in History and English and minored in both Native American Studies and African American Studies. Though he began college with a focus on creative writing, Smyth soon turned his attention to history as he began to read historical novels for his English courses and wanted to know more about the time periods that they were set in.
“I started taking history courses, but the more I learned about U.S. history, the more I wanted to learn about all the things I felt like I was lied to about,” said Smyth. As Smyth began to dig deeper to find the source of systemic injustices, he landed on his specialty: early American history.
“I really wanted to know why the world is the way it is and why there is so much racial and gender inequalit[y] in our world today,” said Smyth. “It is like I was falling further and further back, which is partly why I teach early American history and colonial history. I felt like that was the time period that really helped me understand some origins of things that happen now.” After receiving his bachelor’s degree, Smyth took a seven-year break from academia and moved from Iowa to California.
“I felt like I could not really properly evaluate humans in the past without having tried to live,” said Smyth. “I wanted to go out and just experience the grind of life, to see what it was all about.”
During that time, Smyth worked at a construction company, a window company and a door company before enrolling in a graduate program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he received his Ph.D. in Native American Studies in 2016.
While in graduate school, Smyth became fascinated with the history of the Natchez nation, which was said to have disappeared after fighting a war with the French in 1731. After contacting living members of the Natchez nation, Smyth began working on a book about the nation’s previously ignored history.
“Since 2009, I have been going back to Oklahoma and South Carolina to talk with the community and share my work,” said Smyth. “I do archival work but I also do community building work.”
During the 2024-25 academic year, Smyth will be working on his book on the Natchez nation at William and Mary College’s Omohundro Institute for his postdoctoral fellowship but will return to Vassar the following year.
“I have been grinding as a teacher for years,” said Smyth. “I absolutely love teaching, but it has kept me away from doing some research. So having this time to be able to do it is just amazing.”
Outside of the classroom, Smyth enjoys hiking, playing disc golf and spending time with his wife Kathy and his cat Arrow.