Dr. Jason A. Higgins is an award-winning author, editor, and oral historian at Virginia Tech. He is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator for Virginia Tech Press and an assistant professor, jointly affiliated with University Libraries and the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. He manages journals, supports the publication of books and digital projects, and supervises a digital humanities internship program in Publishing, producing student-centered, community-engaged oral history projects.

Recipient of the Oral History Association Best Book Award in 2025, his book Prisoners after War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration was published by the University of Massachusetts Press. He received a TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) grant to create an open-access e-book copy that’s now available for free. He is also the co-editor of Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History (UMass Press 2022). In the History Department at Virginia Tech, he teaches the Vietnam War, African American History, and Oral History Methods.

Jason earned a Ph.D. in History and a graduate certificate in Public History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He also earned a Master’s in English from Oklahoma State University, which awarded him the Rising Star Alumni Award and the Graduate Research Excellence Award. He is a proud first-generation college student from the University of Arkansas at Monticello, where he double-majored in English and History, graduated Magna Cum Laude, and also earned UAM’s Rising Star Alumni Award.