David Quigley is provost and dean of faculties at Boston College where he is also professor of history. A scholar of the nineteenth-century American city, Quigley received his BA in American studies from Amherst College and his MA and PhD in history from New York University. His research explores the history of race and democracy in the urban United States between the Revolution and Reconstruction with a particular focus on New York City. Among his works are Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction, and the Making of American Democracy and Jim Crow New York: A Documentary History of Race and Citizenship, 1777-1877. Between Amherst and NYU, Quigley taught high school social studies in the New York City public schools at John Jay High School in Brooklyn in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Quigley joined the Boston College History Department in 1998, and earned the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2007. Between 2008 and 2014, he served as dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, during which time he oversaw the hiring of 160 new faculty colleagues and helped lead the design and construction of a new 180,000-square-foot humanities building.

As provost, he has co-chaired the University Strategic Planning Initiative that resulted in Ever to Excel: Advancing Boston College’s Mission (2017) that identified academic priorities for this decade. Since the Board of Trustees approved the plan, over 250 new faculty have joined the University, a number of new programs have been launched including in engineering and public health, and the undergraduate core curriculum has been renewed.

Quigley has initiated a bachelor’s degree program for the incarcerated at a prison in Massachusetts and is helping start a new two-year, residential associate’s degree program. He has chaired the New England Commission on Higher Education, the regional accrediting body for all colleges and universities in the New England states as well as more than a dozen international member institutions.