Trevor Parry-Giles

Trevor Parry-Giles is the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Research in the College of Arts & Humanities and a Professor in the Department of Communication. Prior to becoming the AD for Faculty Affairs and Research, Dr. Parry-Giles served as ARHU's first Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Dr. Parry-Giles’s research and teaching focus on the historical and contemporary relationships between rhetoric, politics, law, and popular culture. He is the author or editor of four books, including The Character of Justice: Rhetoric, Law, and Politics in the Supreme Court Confirmation Process and The Prime-Time Presidency: The West Wing and U.S. Nationalism (with Shawn J. Parry-Giles). His research has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Presidential Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Celebrity Studies, the Journal of Communication, and elsewhere. Dr. Parry-Giles is a Distinguished Research Fellow and a Distinguished Teaching Fellow of the Eastern Communication Association. In 2019, Dr. Parry-Giles received the University of Maryland's Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year Award.

While working for the National Communication Association in the 2010s, Dr. Parry-Giles was the lead director of the Learning Outcomes in Communication project, funded by Lumina Foundation. He authored several essays about disciplinary learning outcomes tuning, the Communication discipline, and research assessment that appeared in Inside Higher Ed, the Academy Data Forum of the AAAS, The Scholarly Kitchen, and elsewhere. Dr. Parry-Giles completed the Big 10 Academic Alliance's Academic Leadership Program in 2024 and was named a 2022 HuMetricsHSS Community Fellow, participating in the HuMetrics "Envisioning the Future Academy" program in 2024. He also completed the ADVANCE program's Equity-Coaching Training at UMD in 2023.

Dr. Parry-Giles is a frequent commentator about contemporary and historical political communication and has appeared on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, the NBC Nightly News, Maryland Public Television, CCTV, and all the network affiliates in Washington, DC. He is quoted often in political news coverage, including in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Politico, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, Bon Appetit, and elsewhere. In addition, Parry-Giles has been interviewed by the BBC, Minnesota Public Radio, New Hampshire Public Radio, Utah Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Radio, WAMU (NPR--Washington, DC), and WYPR (NPR--Baltimore, MD), among others. In 2023, Parry-Giles appeared on a panel discussion sponsored by the White House Historical Association and the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress entitled "The White House and Television."

Current research projects include a critical reading of Netflix's The Crown, exploring the rhetorical life and times of famed New Mexico law enforcement officer and politician Elfego Baca, and examining the screening of the American presidency via popular culture.