VTechWorks
VTechWorks provides global access to Virginia Tech scholarship, including journal articles, books, theses, dissertations, conference papers, slide presentations, technical reports, working papers, administrative documents, videos, images, and more by faculty, students, and staff. Faculty can deposit items to VTechWorks from Elements, including journal articles covered by the University open access policy. Email vtechworks@vt.edu for help.
Open Access Policy
Virginia Tech's open access policy enables researchers to deposit the accepted version of scholarly articles with no embargo.
Theses and Dissertations
Virginia Tech was first in the world to require ETDs in 1997, and continues to add scans of older theses and dissertations.
Open Textbooks
More than 50 freely available and openly licensed textbooks are among our most downloaded items.
Communities in VTechWorks
Select a community to browse its collections.
Recent Submissions
Jasmine Center: Home Away From Home Home As Memory, Identity, And Light In The Heart Of Washington, DC
Fatima, Anosha (Virginia Tech, 2026-04-02)
HOME AWAY FROM HOME
Home as Memory, Identity, and Light in the Heart of Washington, DC Anosha Fatima The thesis examines the concept of home not merely as a physical structure, but as a deeply felt experience. Home is conceived as something that goes beyond the boundaries of the actual building and is influenced by elements such as memory, emotion, and culture.
The thesis further explores the role of architecture as an element that defines the experience of home. Architecture is seen here as a platform through which identity, tradition, and community can be made visible and accessible.
Through the integration of theatre as a place of cultural performance, a restaurant as a location of hospitality, and open courtyards as gathering places, the thesis showcases how architectural design can be used to encourage interaction between different groups of people. Through the integration of these programmatic elements, the thesis aims to create a space that not only encourages interaction but also a space that allows a community to be seen and represented.
Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe
Midura, Rachel (Cornell University Press, 2025-03)
Postal Intelligence connects and situates histories of the post and government intelligence alongside print technology and state power in the wider context of the early modern communications revolution. In the sixteenth century, postal services became central to domestic governance and foreign policy enterprises, extended government reach and surveillance, and offered new control over the public sphere.
Rachel Midura focuses on the Tassis family, members of which served as official postmasters to the dukes of Milan, the pope, Spanish kings, and Holy Roman emperors. Using administrative records and family correspondence, she follows the Tassis family, their agents, and their rivals as their influence expanded from northern Italy across Europe. Postal Intelligence shows how postmasters and postmistresses were key players in early modern diplomacy, commerce, and journalism, whose ultimate success depended on both administrative ingenuity and strategic ambiguity.
Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Became a Way of Life
Wisnioski, Matthew (MIT Press, 2025)
For half a century, innovation served as a universal good in an age of fracture. That consensus is cracking. While the imperative to innovate for a better future continues to fuel systemic change around the world, critics now assail innovation culture as an engine of inequality or accuse its do-gooders of woke groupthink. What happened? Drawing on a decade of research, Every American an Innovator by Matthew Wisnioski investigates how innovation—a once obscure academic term—became ingrained in our institutions, our education, and our beliefs about ourselves.
Wisnioski argues that innovation culture did not spring from the digital revolution, nor can it be boiled down to heroic entrepreneurs or villainous capitalists. Instead, he reveals the central role of a new class of experts in spreading toolkits and mindsets from the cornfields of 1940s Iowa to Silicon Valley tech giants today. This group of engineers, philosophers, bureaucrats, and business leaders posited that “innovators” were society’s most important change agents and remade the nation in their image. The innovation culture they built transcended partisan divisions and made strange bedfellows. Wisnioski shows how Kennedy-era policymakers inspired President Nixon’s dream of a Nobel Prize for innovators, how anti-military professors built the first university incubators for entrepreneurs, how radical feminists became millionaire consultants, how demands for a rust belt manufacturing renaissance inspired theories of a global creative class, how programs that encouraged girls and minority children to pursue innovative lives changed the nature of childhood play, and why the innovation consensus is now in dispute.
The Center for Refugee, Migrant, and Displacement Studies: Working at the Intersection of Gender and Education
Shadle, Brett L.; Hand, Deirdre; Paruar, Awil Agot (Virginia Tech, 2026-03-26)
CRMDS Director Brett Shadle will explore the work of the Center, in particular our focus on refugee and migrant education – in Virginia, across the US, and globally. Our partnership with Elimisha Kakuma, a college-access and college-prep program in Kakuma refuge camp, Kenya, will be highlighted by CRMDS Community Engagement Specialist and EK co-founder Deirdre Hand. We will then hear from EK student and incoming VT undergraduate Awel Agot Paruar about her perseverance in overcoming the challenges she faces as a refugee woman to access education.
Optimal and Robust Control for Systems with Second Order Structure
Neeraj Srinivas, FNU (Virginia Tech, 2026-04-01)
This work aims to investigate the utilization of the structured system matrices (mass, stiff- ness, damping) present in second order systems expressed in the first order and their appli- cations to problems in optimal control and robust control. These structured system matrices may - in certain cases - be symmetric, diagonally dominant, or positive definite. These prop- erties can be leveraged to obtain improvements in computational efficiency and accuracy, which is the core of this dissertation. Three methods are introduced in this work that exploit the structured system matrices in the context of the algebraic Riccati equation (ARE), ap- plied to optimal and robust control problems. As matrix sizes increase, traditional methods for solving the ARE becomes computationally expensive, due to the eigendecompositions in- volved in Schur/subspace methods. This work focuses on algorithmic solutions to the ARE that do not involve the eigendecompositions of the 2n ×2n system matrices, by leveraging properties of the mass, stiffness and damping elements.
An algorithmic solution to the ARE is presented first, which is applicable to second order sys- tems with diagonally dominant system matrices (which may be asymmetric). This method is shown to improve computational efficiency for large systems. Next, the Newton-Kleinman algorithm is utilized in conjunction with the second order system matrices to develop a mod- ified Newton-Kleinman method tailored towards second order systems with positive definite mass, stiffness and damping matrices, in the context of the H-infnity control design prob- lem. This algorithm is shown to have an analytic proof of convergence. An application of this method is demonstrated via a data-driven controller that also minimizes the entropy of the closed loop system. Finally, the discrete time algebraic Riccati equation (DARE) is considered, and a modified discrete Newton-Kleinman algorithm for systems with a second order structure is introduced, that is shown to reduce computational expense as compared to Schur-based methods.