Jason A. Higgins

Dr. Jason A. Higgins is an award-winning author, editor, and oral historian. He is the author of Prisoners after War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration (UMass Press, 2024), winner of the 2025 Oral History Association’s Best Book Award; winner of Virginia Tech’s Albert L. Sturm Research Excellence Award; and finalist for the 2026 Veterans Studies Association Distinguished Book Award. He also co-edited Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History (UMass Press, 2022). His writing has been published in War, Literature & the Arts, The Conversation, and Inquest Magazine. His work has been featured in NBC News, The War Horse, and the Oral History Review.

Higgins is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator for Virginia Tech Publishing & Press; Assistant Professor of History; and the Associate Director for the VT Center for Oral History. At Virginia Tech, he teaches the Vietnam War, Oral History methods, and African American History since 1865. He earned a Ph.D. in History and a graduate certificate in Public History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He holds a Master’s in English from Oklahoma State University and received the Rising Star Award from the OSU College of Arts and Sciences. He is a first-generation college graduate from the University of Arkansas at Monticello where he double-majored in English and History, graduated Magna Cum Laude, and received UAM’s Rising Star Award.