Affiliates

Shawn J. Parry – Giles

Dr. Shawn J. Parry-Giles is Professor of the Department of Communication and is the Director of the Rosenker Center for Political Communication and Civic Leadership at the University of Maryland. She studies rhetoric and political culture with a focus on a study of the presidency, first lady, political campaigns, and the political culture of the post-Civil War era.

Dr. Parry-Giles is the author, co-author, or co-editor of seven books. She has published in such journals of Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Journal of Language and Politics, and Political Communication. She also is co-editor of the NEH-funded Voices of Democracy: The U.S. Oratory Project and co-editor of Recovering Democracy Archives: Speech Recovery Project. She teaches classes in U.S. public address, presidential rhetoric, political communication, politics and media, and writing courses for graduate and undergraduate students.

Books

Memories of Lincoln: and the Splintering of American Political Thought (2017)
Shawn J. Parry-Giles and David S. Kaufer

Hillary Clinton in the News: Gender and Authenticity in American Politics (2014)
Shawn J. Parry-Giles

The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address (2010)
Edited by Shawn J. Parry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan

Public Address and Moral Judgment: Critical Studies in Ethical Tensions (2009)
Edited by Shawn J. Parry-Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles

The Prime-Time Presidency: The West Wing and U.S. Nationalism (2006)
Trevor Parry-Giles and Shawn J. Parry-Giles

The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 1945-1955 (2002)
Shawn J. Parry-Giles

Constructing Clinton: Hyperreality and Presidential Image-Making in Postmodern Politics (2002)
Shawn J. Parry-Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles

Linda Aldoory

Dr. Linda Aldoory was Endowed Chair and Director of the Herschel S. Horowitz Center for Health Literacy and Associate Professor in Behavioral & Community Health at the School of Public Health from 2011 to 2015. Her research focuses on health communication, specifically, public health campaigns and message design and their effects on underserved health populations.

Aldoory is currently part of a funded research project supported through the Health Enterprise Zone grant awarded Prince George’s County Health Department by the State of Maryland. Her role is to conduct community-based participatory research and develop a health literacy campaign for Capitol Heights, MD. Another sponsored research initiative is funded by Atlantic General Hospital and Health System to integrate health communication concepts into common core curriculum in Worcester County Public Schools. Her research is published in top journals, such as Journal of Communication, Journal of Health Communication, Health Communication, Journal of Public Relations Research, and Women & Health.

Aldoory serves as member of the Maryland State Health Care Commission’s Health Information Exchange Policy Board and the Consumer Engagement Taskforce for the Maryland State Health Services and Cost Review Commission. She is Board Member of Healthcare Access Maryland. She also is member of the Behavioral Health Workgroup of Prince George’s County Health and Human Services and the Maryland Women’s Coalition for Health Care Reform Advisory Committee.

Aldoory formerly worked in health communication and public relations for The Bronx Perinatal Consortium, a maternal child health organization in The Bronx, NY; Hill & Knowlton Public Relations; the American Psychiatric Association; and the National Alliance for Mental Illness. She continues to consult for such organizations as the U.S. Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, American Health Insurance Plans, and the U.S. Drug Administration.

Books

The Gender Challenge to Media (2001)
Edited by Elizabeth L. Toth and Linda Aldoory

Anne-Bennett Smithson

Dr. Smithson’s research focuses upon social network analysis, political communication, new media and elections, and media literacy. Before entering academia, Dr. Smithson worked as an attorney in Texas, and she constantly looks for ways in which to incorporate her legal background into her teaching and research. Specifically, she launched a course at UMD in the fall of 2018 that explores the First Amendment from a communication perspective. Her teaching experience also includes courses in interpersonal communication, political communication, organizational communication, communication research methods, and oral communication.

Dr. Smithson is a 2004 graduate of the University of Kentucky College of Communication and Information Studies and a 2008 graduate of Salmon P. Chase College of Law. She practiced law for two years in Texas before moving to Washington, D.C. In 2012, she earned her Master of Arts at Georgetown University, and in 2017 she completed her Ph.D. at George Mason University.  Dr. Smithson lives in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C. with her husband and three sons.

Skye de Saint Felix

Skye (she/her) is a professional-track faculty member in Communication. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Maryland in Rhetoric and Political Culture. Before Maryland, Skye received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in rhetoric and gender studies. Skye has published in academic journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Women’s Studies in Communication, Argumentation and Advocacy, and the World Medical and Health Policy. She has also written for popular press mediums such as The Conversation and authored many book chapters. Skye has experience teaching Public Speaking, Communication and Gender, Communication Inquiry, Professional Writing and Communication, and Rhetorical Methods. She also taught in the Honors College at UMD in the Diversity and Design Cultures Program.

In addition to her research and teaching, Skye is the co-editor of Voices of Democracy and Recovering Democracy Archives, journals dedicated to archival speech recovery. She also is a mentor at Intellect Bay, a professional development resource for Ph.D. candidates.

Kathleen E. Kendall

Dr. Kendall’s research focuses on political campaign communication, particularly in the presidential primaries and in presidential debates.

She has produced a DVD/video on the primaries (Primaries: Defining the Battle in New Hampshire, www.films.com). Dr. Kendall has received awards for her teaching and scholarship from the Eastern Communication Association, and was a Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University in 1997. She regularly gives her analysis of political communication events in media interviews.

Books

Communication in the Presidential Primaries: Candidates and the Media, 1912-2000 (2000)
Kathleen E. Kendall

Presidential Campaign Discourse: Strategic Communication Problems (1995)
Edited by Kathleen E. Kendall &nbs;

Sahar Mohamed Khamis

Dr. Sahar Khamis is an expert on Arab and Muslim media, and the former Head of the Mass Communication and Information Science Department in Qatar University. She is a former Mellon Islamic Studies Initiative Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago.

She is the co-author of the books: Islam Dot Com: Contemporary Islamic Discourses in Cyberspace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Egyptian Revolution 2.0: Political Blogging, Civic Engagement and Citizen Journalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Additionally, she authored and co-authored numerous book chapters, journal articles and conference papers, regionally and internationally, in both English and Arabic. She is the recipient of a number of prestigious academic and professional awards, as well as a member of the editorial boards of several journals in the field of communication, in general, and the field of Arab and Muslim media, in particular.

Dr. Khamis is a media commentator and analyst, a public speaker, a human rights commissioner in the Human Rights Commission in Montgomery County, Maryland, and a radio host, who presents a monthly radio show on “U.S. Arab Radio” (the first Arab-American radio station broadcasting in the U.S. and Canada).

Books

Arab Women’s Activism and Socio-Political Transformation: Unfinished Gendered Revolution (2017)
Sahar Khamis and Amel Mili

Egyptian Revolution 2.0: Political Blogging, Civic Engagement and Citizen Journalism (2013)

Islam Dot Com: Contemporary Islamic Discourses in Cyberspace (2009)
Mohammed el-Nawawy and Sahar Khamis

Kristy Maddux

Kristy Maddux is a rhetorical critic who studies popular discourses of citizenship, especially as they intersect with discourses of gender and religion. Some of her work, including her first book, concerns contemporary discourses of citizenship. In The Faithful Citizen (Baylor University Press, 2010), she illuminates and interrogates the civic ideals that emerge in popular religious-themed films, books, and television shows.

Her other work focuses on historical discourses, and she has published essays about William Jennings Bryan, Aimee Semple McPherson, Rosalynn Carter, and other historical figures. Her current research project examines the women’s congresses held in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. There, women from various classes and diverse activist commitments contested and performed women’s citizenship. That event, thus, allows a unique glimpse into circulating ideas of women’s citizenship in the late nineteenth century.

Dr. Maddux tends to teach classes related to these topics. At the undergraduate level, she routinely teaches our required methods course, Interpreting Strategic Discourse, in addition to a social movements class about the nineteenth-century women’s movement and a political communication class that focuses on everyday practices of ordinary citizenship. At the graduate level, she has taught Historical/Critical Research Methods, Communication and Social Change, Introduction to Graduate Studies, and a special topics course about American feminist history, theory, and public address.

Current research projects include recovery and analysis of sermons preached by Aimee Semple McPherson, an early twentieth-century evangelist. As a case study, McPherson illuminates the rhetorical characteristics of the schisms between fundamentalism, modernism, evangelicalism, and Pentecostalism in the 1920s, as well as the changing gender dynamics of that era.

Books

The Faithful Citizen: Popular Christian Media and Gendered Civic Identities (2010)
Kristy Maddux

Practicing Citizenship: Women’s Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (2019)

Adam Wayne Nixon

Adam is a television producer with extensive expertise in public diplomacy. He has produced 750 television broadcasts from Washington, DC to Jerusalem to San Francisco for the Congressionally funded Middle East Broadcasting Networks, sister-station to Voice of America, where he has helmed the network’s longest-running show, Inside Washington. Prior to that he was the show producer of nationally-syndicated McLaughlin One on One on PBS, a senior producer on The McLaughlin Group, and worked with NBC News Washington, CNN, ABC News New York, Fox Television and on many documentary films in varied roles. When not in the studio or in the classroom he roams the halls of Congress looking for stakeout locations and quick sound bites.

An ethnographer, Dr. Nixon’s research concerns no-budget digital filmmakers and the thousands of film festivals around the world that showcase low-budget cinema. A filmmaker himself, his no-budget movie Aspirin for the Masses was awarded Best Feature United States at the San Francisco Global Movie Fest, the Audience Award at the Cannes Underground Film Festival, and was an Official Selection of the St. Tropez and Milan International Film Festivals – among others. His screenplay for the film was a finalist in the Sundance Screenwriting Competition, and an Official Selection of the Beverly Hills Film Festival, the Los Angeles Film and Script Festival and the Mountain Film Festival. His plays were presented at festivals in London, Romania, Switzerland and the U.S.

He is a member of UMD’s Communication Department as Professional Track Faculty in digital visual communication.

Trevor Parry-Giles

Dr. Parry-Giles’s research and teaching focuses on the historical and contemporary relationships between rhetoric, politics, law, and popular culture. He is the co-author The Prime-Time Presidency: The West Wing and U.S. Nationalism and Constructing Clinton: Hyperreality and Presidential Image-Making in Postmodern Politics (which received the Everett Lee Hunt Award from the Eastern Communication Association).

Dr. Parry-Giles is also the author of The Character of Justice: Rhetoric, Law, and Politics in the Supreme Court Confirmation Process (recipient of the NCA Diamond Anniversary Book Award, the Kohrs-Campbell Prize in Rhetorical Criticism, and the NCA Public Address Division’s Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award). His research has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, the Journal of Communication, and elsewhere. Dr. Parry-Giles is a Distinguished Research Fellow and a Distinguished Teaching Fellow of the Eastern Communication Association.

Current research projects include exploring the role of image and character in U.S. political discourse and political judgment, the depictions of the U.S. presidency in popular culture, critically tracing the history of American presidential campaign rhetoric, and examining the Cold War rhetorics of geopolitical change and anxiety in contemporary popular culture.

Books

Public Address and Moral Judgment: Critical Studies in Ethical Tensions (2009)
Edited by Shawn J. Parry-Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles

The Character of Justice: Rhetoric, Law, and Politics in the Supreme Court Confirmation Process (2006)
Trevor-Parry-Giles

The Prime-Time Presidency: The West Wing and U.S. Nationalism (2006)
Trevor Parry-Giles and Shawn J. Parry-Giles

Constructing Clinton: Hyperreality and Presidential Image-Making in Postmodern Politics (2002)
Shawn J. Parry-Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles

Dale Timothy White

Tim White has enjoyed several careers: broadcast journalist, documentary filmmaker, military officer, academic, public diplomacy practitioner, private and public sector executive. Along the way, he has been a ditch digger, auto assembly line worker, and woefully inadequate hardware clerk. Born in Michigan, he has degrees from Michigan State and the University of Southern California, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland.

After active military service, Tim received a Foreign Service appointment as executive producer of film and television with the US Information Agency. His assignments included Russia, New Guinea, India, Europe, Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Africa. Later, through his company Lives and Legacies Films, he produced documentaries for PBS and other networks. The projects included award-winning biographies of Margaret Mead, Leonard Bernstein, Buckminster Fuller, John Hope Franklin, I.M. Pei, Elie Wiesel and others. As a reporter, anchor and producer for NBC, Fox. ABC and PBS affiliates around the country he won six Emmy awards. At one point, he hosted a show at Paramount Studios in Hollywood and also had occasional roles in soap operas – which proved to be very hard work. In 2005, Tim was inducted into the Radio and Television Broadcasters Hall of Fame. Currently, he is president of the Literary Society of Washington – a 145-year-old organization fighting a rear guard action against modernity.

He served in the U.S. Air Force over thirty years, active and Reserve, and retired with the rank of brigadier general.

Tim lives in Arlington, Virginia and Cody, Wyoming. In Cody, he pursues his interest in Western history and serves on the board of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. His daughter, Elizabeth, is a rising young executive in the aerospace industry.

Andrew D. Wolvin

Dr. Wolvin’s research interests center on issues dealing with listening behavior, communication education, and communication management.

Dr. Wolvin is also the Director of COMM 107 – Oral Communication: Principles and Practice. This course is a multi-section hybrid basic course on the communication process, intrapersonal communication (including listening), interpersonal communication (including conversation, interviewing, and group interactions), and public communication (including informative briefing and persuasive speaking). The course meets the communication needs of a wide range of students enrolled from throughout the university each semester. The sections are taught by graduate teaching assistants and instructors from the Department of Communication.

Books

Listening and Human Communication in the 21st Century (2010)

Communicating: A Social and Career Focus (2013)

Listening (1996)

Business Communication in a Changing World (1997)

What Every Student Should Know About Listening (2010)

Listenable Briefings (2009)

Handbook of Public Communication (2005)

Carly S. Woods

Carly S. Woods researches and teaches about argumentation, social change, and the rhetoric of diverse voices. Her work focuses on how deliberation and debate can be used to negotiate identity, power, and social difference. She draws from feminist, cultural, and rhetorical theory to explore histories of public address and argument, with an eye toward how they might inform contemporary discourse. Her publications appear in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Argumentation and Advocacy, Women’s Studies in Communication, KB Journal, and elsewhere. Woods is the recipient of the Organization for Research on Women and Communication’s Research Development Grant, the American Society for the History of Rhetoric’s Outstanding Dissertation Award, the Helen F. Faust Women Writers Award, and several teaching honors. She is an affiliate faculty member in UMD’s Department of Women’s Studies.

Books

Debating Women: Gender, Education, and Spaces for Argument: 1835-1945 (2018)

Lauren Hunter

Lauren Hunter is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland. She studies rhetoric and political culture with a focus on food and social change. Lauren is also a graduate assistant for the Mark and Heather Rosenker Center for Political Communication and Civic Leadership. She is a co-editor of the Recovering Democracy Archives Project and she serves as assistant to the directors of the NEH-funded Voices of Democracy: The U.S. Oratory Project. Lauren earned her M.A. from the University of Maryland and her B.A. and B.S. from Georgia Southern University.