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.
Abigail Middleton, Administrative Coordinator
Abigail Middleton is the Administrative Coordinator for the Virginia Tech Center for Humanities. In this role, Abigail coordinates general operations of the Center, manages social media and communication, and helps plan and organize Center events and activities. Abigail holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Northeastern Illinois University and a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) from the University of Pittsburgh. Originally from Illinois, Abigail moved to Blacksburg with her family in 2017. Abigail can be reached at amiddleton@vt.edu.
Fellows
Faculty Fellow
Lillian Frost
Lillian Frost is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. She specializes in citizenship, migration, gender, and Middle East politics, particularly in Jordan. She has held research fellow positions with the European University Institute’s Max Weber Programme, United States Institute of Peace, Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs’ Middle East Initiative, American Center of Research in Jordan, and Fulbright Program in Jordan. She received her PhD in Political Science from the George Washington University, and her dissertation won the 2021 Best Dissertation Award from the American Political Science Association's Middle East and North Africa Politics Section. You can find more details about her research at https://lillianfrost.weebly.com/
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
Madison Smith
Madison is a graduate student in the History Department at Virginia Tech, where she is pursuing her M.A. in History. Originally from Colorado, she earned her B.A. in History with a concentration in Classics and the Ancient Mediterranean from Roanoke College in 2024. Her current research explores East Asian perspectives on race and racism in the nineteenth-century United States, drawing on sources such as personal diaries, legal writings, and immigration court cases. She is particularly passionate about the historical development of immigration ideologies and their evolution into modern frameworks.
Claire Wood
Hi my name is Claire Wood and I am a doctoral student in the Sociology Department here at Virginia Tech. I got my Master's in Sociology from VCU and did my undergraduate at Virginia Tech (Go Hokies!). My main areas within sociology are Crime and Deviance as well as Peace, War, and Social Conflict. More specifically, my dissertation will look at the memorialization, identity, and collective memory of April 16th at Virginia Tech and Blacksburg.