Jason Higgins, Ph.D.

2024 Rising Star

M.A. English, '16

Dr. Jason A. Higgins, a first-generation college graduate, is the digital scholarship coordinator for Virginia Tech Publishing and assistant professor with VT University Libraries and the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.

After earning undergraduate degrees from the University of Arkansas at Monticello, Jason received his M.A. in English from OSU in 2016. He wrote his thesis on Vietnam veteran autobiographies and won the Graduate Research Excellence Award. For his history Ph.D. — which he completed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst — Jason specialized in the Vietnam War, African American history and global history.

Jason has focused his career on studying the effects of war on military veterans. He’s completed over 120 oral history interviews with veterans, including 30 as an intern in the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program in 2014.

In 2023, Jason directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute to train K-12 teachers on how to do oral history projects with veterans.

Jason is currently supervising VT Corps of Cadets students to interview alumni who served in Vietnam. He is also working with the More Than a Fraction Foundation to lead a project with descendants of those who were enslaved on the land Virginia Tech now occupies, exploring the potential of oral history to promote truth and reconciliation.

Jason — who published his first monograph, “Prisoners after War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration” in 2024 — is raising two “kind and funny children,” Maya and Ian, with his wife Danyelle.