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. Quigley is also the author of recently published The Man Behind the Cane: Preston Brooks, Political Violence, and the Road to the Civil War, Oxford University Press. His studies tell the story of Preston Brooks, the South Carolina Congressman who achieved notoriety by caning Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate in 1856. 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.
Angeli Yates, Administrative Coordinator
Angeli Yates is the administrative coordinator for the Center for Humanities. With a strong background in the arts and community involvement, Angeli is passionate about advancing the humanities. Don't hesitate to reach out - she is happy to help!
Email: angeli@vt.edu
Fellows
Faculty Fellow
Sophia Tingting Zhao
Sophia Tingting Zhao (Ph.D., East Asian Languages and Cultures, Stanford University) is Associate Professor of Chinese in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures at Virginia Tech. Her research explores Chinese theatre and performance in global contexts, with particular interests in transnational cultural exchange, global modernism, media and technology, performance historiography, gender, and the ways artistic forms travel across languages, cultures, and media.
Zhao is the author or co-author of five scholarly books on Chinese theatre and literature. He recent monograph Globalizing Chinese Theatre 《面向世界的中国戏剧》 (Fudan University Press, 2026), examines how Chinese dramatists, performers, and intellectuals engaged with world theatre between 1911 and 1949, not simply as recipients of foreign influences but as active participants in shaping global understandings of Chinese theatre. Her forthcoming monograph, Mei Lanfang and Gender Studies 《梅兰芳与女性文化研究》 (Beijing Publishing House, forthcoming 2026), offers a book-length study of gender, female impersonation, and theatrical stardom through one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century Chinese theatre.
As a Center for Humanities Faculty Fellow, Zhao is working on her new book, Stages in Motion: Chinese Theatre and the Making of Global Modernism. The book examines how Chinese theatre traveled across Asia, Europe, and the United States in the early twentieth century through performance, translation, print, photography, film, and transnational intellectual networks. Challenging narratives that position China primarily as a recipient of Western modernism, Stages in Motion argues that Chinese theatre actively shaped global theatrical experimentation and the making of modernism across cultural and media boundaries.
Zhao’s scholarship in Chinese theatre and performance studies has received national and international recognition, including the Wang Guowei Award for Academic Paper on Drama, multiple Best Paper Awards from the Mei Lanfang Research Young Scholars Forum, and the Emerging Scholar Award from the Association for Asian Performance.
Graduate Research Assistant
Mikaela David-John
Mikaela David-John, PhD Student of Higher Education
Mikaela David-John is a Ph.D. student in Higher Education at Virginia Tech. Prior to transitioning to full-time doctoral study, she served in student-facing roles at Virginia Tech for four years, where she focused on holistic student success.
Mikaela's work centers on leveraging campus partnerships, resources, and one-on-one coaching to help students thrive and develop transferable leadership skills. She earned a bachelor's degree in Advertising and Public Relations from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a master's degree in Family, Youth and Community Sciences from the University of Florida. Her professional background spans communications, program planning, evaluation, and community-engaged work. Since 2022, she has served as co-advisor for Virginia Tech's Hokie Chapter of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES). Her research interests explore the intersection of Indigenous success in higher education and Indigenous advocacy and activism.
Graduate Fellows
Annie Shaba
Annie Shaba, PhD candidate in Foundations of Education
Annie Shaba is a Ph.D. candidate in Foundations of Education at Virginia Tech whose work focuses on place-based education, rural education, and expanding opportunities for rural youth. She is passionate about designing and supporting community-based programs that connect learning to local places and encourage young people to discover their strengths and future possibilities. Her research and practice explore how rural communities can leverage local assets to enrich learning, strengthen youth development, and cultivate thriving communities.
Shuvro Das
Shuvro Das is a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric and Writing Program at Virginia Tech. His research interest includes Technical and Professional Communication, Pedagogy, Non-Western Rhetoric, Cultural Rhetoric, Autoethnography, and Writing Across the Curriculum. His dissertation focuses on making Technical and Professional Communication pedagogy more globally inclusive by incorporating non-western rhetorical practices, such as, Ancient Indian Justice Rhetoric. He teaches First Year Writing, Writing from Research, and Technical Writing. His work has appeared in Xchanges, Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric, Composition Studies, The Sandbox, Proceedings of American Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Design of Communication (ACM SIGDOC) and Edited collections. He has presented at numerous national and international conferences. He has been the recipient of national awards including the Conference on College Composition and Communication Scholar’s for the Dream Award and Gloria Anzaldua Rhetorician Award.