Ryan McMillen, Ph.D.

Ryan McMillen is a professor of American history who lives a stone’s throw from the banks of the Hudson River in Red Hook, New York. For the past two decades he has taught at eleven different universities and developed over twenty different live courses in the fields of History, American Studies, and English. Like his New York City public schoolteacher parents, he has devoted his life to teaching others about the joy of literary and historical research, discovery, and exploration.

In 2005, Ryan received his doctorate in American Studies after the submission of a lengthy dissertation on the subject of America’s centuries-long fixation on the evacuation of the planet and the colonization of space. For the past decade he has pivoted to unearth a series of exciting revelations from a Civil War-era trove of family archival material which he inherited.

Ryan founded an antiquarian book and ephemera business in 1999 to pay his way through graduate school, and can still be found haunting estate sales, book sales, and auctions in the Northeast. Several of his stunning finds -- amongst them several diaries and archives of letters --  have been sold at Christie’s, Bonham’s, and Swann Galleries.

Email Ryan here.

Visit his Substack here.