People
Center Leadership
Paul Quigley, Director of the Center for Humanities
Paul Quigley is Director of the Center for Humanities at Virginia Tech. He also serves as Director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies and the James I. Robertson, Jr. Associate Professor of Civil War Studies. Originally from Manchester, England, he holds degrees from Lancaster University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Quigley is the author of Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848-65, which won awards from the British Association for American Studies, the American Civil War Museum, and Phi Beta Kappa. His work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Southern History and Journal of the Civil War Era, as well as the Roanoke Times, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Washington Post, and the New York Times Disunion section. He edited a volume of essays entitled The Civil War and the Transformation of American Citizenship, and coedited another essay collection, Reconciliation after Civil Wars: Global Perspectives. His study of Preston Brooks, the South Carolina Congressman who achieved notoriety by caning Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate in 1856, is under contract with Oxford University Press. Quigley also leads the NEH-funded project “Experiencing Civil War History Through Augmented Reality: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Environment at Pamplin Historical Park.”
Quigley serves on the editorial board of the journal Civil War History, and has previously served on the advisory boards of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond and the Society of Civil War Historians.
Rishi Jaitly, Distinguished Humanities Fellow
Rishi Jaitly is a distinguished entrepreneur, executive and educator with extensive global experience in technology, media, and civics.
As Professor of Practice and Distinguished Humanities Fellow at Virginia Tech, he founded the Institute for Leadership in Technology, which offers the world's first Executive Leadership Credential in the Humanities to rising leaders in the world's technology landscape. Additionally, Jaitly serves as a Senior Advisor to OpenAI.
Previously, Jaitly served as Founding CEO of Times Bridge, a leading venture capital firm facilitating international expansion for world-leading companies, including Airbnb, Coursera and Uber. Before Times Bridge, he was Twitter’s Vice President for Asia Pacific, Middle East, and North Africa. Prior to that, Jaitly held leadership roles at Google & YouTube in South Asia and in Washington, D.C., and served as a speechwriter for Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Jaitly has also devoted a range of his career to social entrepreneurship, co-founding initiatives such as Michigan Corps, Kiva Detroit and the BMe Community, and having served as a Director at both College Summit and Knight Foundation. He presently serves as Vice Chairman of the National Humanities Center and Board Director of Virginia Humanities. Jaitly, who is a former Trustee of Princeton University, was in 2022 recognized as one of Rest of World Magazine’s “Top 100 Global Tech Changemakers.”
A public speaker who has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Forbes Magazine, and on CNN, MSNBC and the BBC, Jaitly earned his A.B. in History and Certificate in American Studies from Princeton University.
Fellows
Faculty Fellow
Marian Mollen
Marian Mollin is an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech. Her research analyzes the connections between gender, protest, religion, activism, and culture.
Graduate Research Assistant
Sara Naghibizadeh
Sara Naghibizadeh, Ph.D. student in ASPECT (Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought)
Sara Naghibizadeh is a Ph.D. student in the ASPECT program (Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought) at Virginia Tech. With a background in urban studies and planning, her work explores the politics of urban space, knowledge and policy circulation, and citizenship—particularly in the context of the Global South. She is also affiliated with the Institute for Policy and Governance at Virginia Tech.
Graduate Fellows
Waris Ahmad Faizi
Waris Ahmad Faizi, PhD Student in Sociology
Waris Ahmad Faizi is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at Virginia Tech. His research interests include economic sociology, digital sociology, computational social science, global political economy, and international development, with a particular focus on organizations, work and labor markets, gig economies, and digitally mediated forms of labor. He connects these interests by examining how large-scale economic transformations and rapidly evolving digital infrastructures interact with enduring systems of social inequality. Using an intersectional, quantitative analytic approach, his work links micro-level experiences of workers, firms, and communities with macro-level structural shifts to analyze how institutional logics, market structures, and emerging technologies reshape access to opportunity, economic stability, and social mobility.
Zahra Modarres
Zahra Modarres is a PhD candidate in the ASPECT program (History and Political Science) at Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on education, state formation, and political culture in modern Iran, with particular attention to policy, institutions, and everyday schooling across the twentieth century. She works at the intersection of history, political analysis, and archival research, while also engaging in interdisciplinary and creative projects related to knowledge production and cultural practice