Graduate Faculty

Lindsey Anderson (Ph.D., Purdue) broadly studies the intersections of communication, age and emotion. In particular, she is an interpretive scholar who focuses her work on communication assessments and communication education coupled with organizational processes related to employee age and workplace emotion (e.g., career socialization, training and mentoring).

Associate Professor, Public Relations & Strategic Communication

Briana Barner (Ph.D., University of Texas) is an interdisciplinary critical and cultural communications scholar with research interests in Black podcasts, digital and Black feminism, digital media, Black cultural production and representation. Her work has been published in Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, Film Quarterly, and the edited collection Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography, Feminist Approaches to Media Theory and Research and Black Sisterhoods: Paradigms and Praxis. Briana is currently working on a manuscript about the cultural production of Black podcasts.

Assistant Professor, Media & Digital Studies

Ganga Dhanesh's (Ph.D., National University of Singapore) prior experience in corporate and non-profit sectors has informed her extensive research program on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and strategic communication across issues, publics, cultures, and geographies. A recent bibliometric analysis placed her among the top two most productive scholars on CSR within public relations research. Bridging academia and practice, Dr. Dhanesh actively consults for national and multinational organizations on strategic communication.

Associate Professor, Public Relations & Strategic Communication

Nick Joyce (Ph.D., Arizona) is interested in the communicative and psychological processes underlying intercultural relationships. One major area of his research examines how and why intercultural narratives and other forms of intergroup communication can be used to foster empathy, change perceptions and improve attitudes toward other cultures and groups.

Associate Professor, Communication Science & Social Cognition

Sahar Khamis (Ph.D., Manchester) is an expert on Arab and Muslim media and the former Head of the Mass Communication and Information Science Department at Qatar University. She is a former Mellon Islamic Studies Initiative visiting professor at the University of Chicago.

Associate Professor, Public Relations & Strategic Communication

Jiyoun Kim (Ph.D., Wisconsin) is a communication science researcher who has been concerned with the dynamics of public engagement in emerging interactive media with a special emphasis on contested issues. Her personal interest in risk, health and science communication was spurred by her research experiences in the societal implications of nanotechnology group in the NSF-funded Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC). Currently, she is interested in how social media influences public attitudes, interest and engagement toward controversial issues. Kim's research has been presented at several conferences and appeared in numerous academic journals including Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Risk Analysis, Energy Policy, and Journal of Nanoparticle Research.

Assistant Professor, Communication Science & Social Cognition

Sun Young Lee’s (Ph.D., North Carolina) research focuses mainly on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and crisis/risk communication. In particular, she investigates visual strategies in various contexts, including CSR and international crises; how co-creational strategies for CSR activities can generate social value; how publics process CSR messages; and the effects of CSR strategies before or after a crisis.

Associate Professor, Public Relations & Strategic Communication

Brooke Liu's (Ph.D., North Carolina) research investigates how effective risk and crisis communication can optimally prepare the public to respond to and recover from disasters. In recent years, her research has focused on the potentially unique roles that governments’ social and mobile media can play in building community resilience.

Professor, Public Relations & Strategic Communication

Kristy Maddux (Ph.D., Georgia) 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.

Associate Professor, Rhetoric & Political Culture

Kang Namkoong’s (Ph.D., Wisconsin) research focuses on the interrelationships between emerging media and health communication, with areas of focus including web- and mobile-based eHealth system effects, cancer communications, health promotion, occupational health and safety and nutrition education. His research program consists of two interrelated lines of inquiry that concern treatment-oriented health interventions and prevention-oriented health campaigns. The former concern the effect of interactive communication technologies on patients’ physical and psychological health benefits. The latter concern the potential of ICTs in addressing health outcome disparities among underserved populations.

Associate Professor, Communication Science & Social Cognition

Xiaoli Nan’s (Ph.D., Minnesota) research is focused on health and risk communication, particularly the role of persuasive messages and traditional and emerging media in shaping health risk perceptions, attitudes and behaviors. She is director of the University of Maryland's Center for Health and Risk Communication. She is an affiliate faculty member of the Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center Population Science Program.

Professor, Communication Science & Social Cognition

Nana Osei Fordjour's (Ph.D., University of New Mexico) research interests revolves around the intersection of public relations, political rhetoric, and media. Specifically, Dr. Osei Fordjour investigates how politicians construct their public image in governance, crises, and elections. He also studies how the media frames politicians and phenomena such as crises to assess their broader implications. He has over a decade of experience in public relations, and his research revolves around the intersection of public relations, political rhetoric, and media. Specifically, Dr. Osei Fordjour investigates how politicians construct their public image in governance, crises, and elections. He also studies how the media frames politicians and phenomena such as crises to assess their broader implications.

Assistant Professor, Public Relations & Strategic Communication

Hailey Otis' (Ph.D., Colorado State University) research draws from intersectional feminist theory, queer theory, fat studies, and rhetorical theory and criticism to investigate the embodied and intersectional rhetorical tactics through which activists, advocates, influencers, and social media users envision and bring into being more liberatory worlds for multiply marginalized bodies. She is a critical rhetorical scholar committed to social justice and leveraging the tools of communication and rhetoric toward advocacy and worldmaking. Hailey is committed to innovative, social justice-oriented approaches to teaching and learning and has developed and presented a variety of pedagogical workshops on topics such as anti-ableist pedagogy and disability justice as well as abolitionist and anti-racist pedagogies.

Assistant Professor, Rhetoric & Political Culture

Shawn J. Parry-Giles (Ph.D., Indiana) teaches and studies rhetoric and politics. Her research has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Rhetoric & Public Affairs and elsewhere. She is the director of the University of Maryland's Center for Political Communication and Civic Leadership. She is also co-editor of the journal: Voices of Democracy, a project that was initially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Professor & Chair, Rhetoric & Political Culture

Trevor Parry-Giles (Ph.D., Indiana) studies rhetoric and political culture and legal rhetoric. Current research projects include exploring the role of image and character in U.S. political discourse and political judgment and examining the Cold War rhetorics of geopolitical change and anxiety in contemporary popular culture. A former editor of Communication Quarterly, Parry-Giles is also the recipient of the NCA Diamond Anniversary Book Award and the Kohrs-Campbell Prize in Rhetorical Criticism. He is a distinguished research fellow and a distinguished teaching fellow of the Eastern Communication Association and in 2019, Parry-Giles received the University of Maryland's Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year Award.

Professor, Rhetoric & Political Culture

Damien Smith Pfister (Ph.D., Pittsburgh) is a rhetorical critic and theorist who examines the confluence of digitally networked media, rhetorical practice, public deliberation and visual culture. His interest in how nascent genres of communication provide new opportunities for citizens to affect public deliberation is reflected in Networked Rhetorics, Networked Media: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere (Penn State UP, 2014). Pfister is the co-editor, with Michele Kennerly of Pennsylvania State University, of Ancient Rhetorics + Digital Networks (U of Alabama Press, 2017), a volume that looks to ancient figures, texts and sensibilities to illuminate communication phenomena in digital networks.

Associate Professor, Rhetoric & Political Culture

Yan Qu's (Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) research focuses on using and advancing an egocentric network approach in examining relationship management and public engagement, among other public relations topics. His secondary research program concerns corporate social responsibility/corporate social advocacy in an international, cross-cultural context. Dr. Qu is the winner of 2022 ICA James E. Grunig and Larissa A. Grunig Outstanding Dissertation Award and multiple top paper awards at AEJMC and IPRRC. His research has appeared in a variety of peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Public Relations Research, Public Relations Review, and International Journal of Strategic Communication.

Assistant Professor, Public Relations & Strategic Communication

Anita Atwell Seate (Ph.D., Arizona) is a social scientist that researches in the area of intergroup/intercultural communication. Specifically, her research is animated by questions about how people’s identity as members of various social groups impacts communication processes. She studies a variety of social groups including identities based on race, ethnicity, age, gender and sexual orientation, with an emphasis placed on racial and ethnic groups.

Associate Professor, Communication Science & Social Cognition

Catherine Knight Steele (Ph.D., Illinois-Chicago) is a scholar of race, gender and media with specific focus on African American culture and discourse in traditional and new media. Dr. Steele's research on the Black blogosphere, digital discourses of resistance, and digital Black feminism has been published in such journals as Social Media + Society, Information, Communication and Society, and Television and New Media. Her book Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press Fall 2021), examines the relationship between Black women and technology as a centuries-long gendered and racial project in the U.S.

Associate Professor, Rhetoric & Political Culture

Leah Waks (Ph.D., Michigan) teaches communication theory, persuasion and group dynamics. She is an expert in leadership training, mediation and conflict management. Her main research interest is in the interplay of cognitions, attitudes and emotions in conflict creation and conflict management, in organizations and in groups.

Professional Track Faculty, Communication Science & Social Cognition

Carly S. Woods (Ph.D., Pittsburgh) 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.

Associate Professor, Rhetoric & Political Culture

Carina M. Zelaya (Ph.D., University of Kentucky), leveraging interpersonal communication and mass media, she studies the impact of interpersonal conversations in cognitive processing of mass media campaign messages and its effects on individuals' perceptions of message effectiveness and future health behaviors. Her current projects develop and evaluate evidence-based interventions that focus on disparities driven by social, racial, economical, and environmental factors.

Assistant Professor, Communication & Social Cognition

Linda Aldoory (Ph.D., Syracuse) 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.

Professor Emerita, Public Relations & Strategic Communication

Elizabeth L. Toth (Ph.D., Purdue) joined the Department of Communication of the University of Maryland in Fall 2004. Toth has co-authored Women and Public Relations: How Gender Influences Practice, The Velvet Ghetto: The Increasing Numbers of Women in Public Relations, Beyond the Velvet Ghetto and the PRSA Glass Ceiling studies. She co-authored, edited, and co-edited eight books including Women and Public Relations: How Gender Influences Practice; Rhetorical and Critical Approaches to Public Relations II, and The Future of Feminism in Public Relations and Strategic Communication: A Socio-ecological Model of Influence.

Professor Emerita, Public Relations & Strategic Communication

Andrew Wolvin's (Ph.D., Purdue) research interests center on issues dealing with listening behavior, communication education and communication management. He has been awarded the International Listening Association Lifetime Achievement Award and named a Global Listening Centre’s Outstanding Listening Scholar. He is past president of the International Listening Association and the Eastern Communication Association. He has extensive experience providing communication training and development for federal agencies and private corporations.

Professor Emeritus, Communication Education

Becca Beets (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin–Madison) researches communication and perceptions of emerging areas of science, particularly the intersections between publics’ attitudes towards science, engagement, and communication in new media environments. As a mixed-methods researcher, Becca’s work involves using both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Her current research explores these topics in the context of scientific uncertainty. Becca previously worked in the fields of science policy and digital communication.

Assistant Professor, Science Communication and New Media

Andrew Boge (Ph.D., University of Iowa) examines how racial ideologies are produced, maintained, and disrupted in public discourse. Informed by scholars of color in digital media and rhetorical studies, and intersectional race and ethnic studies, his work reckons with the real, situated violence of racism and the agential force of racialized peoples to disrupt such violence via discursive worldbuilding. Dr. Parayil Boge’s primary research project examines South Asian American racialization by theorizing the cultural and transnational logics of (anti-)brownness across racial projects.

Dr. Parayil Boge’s first book project, tentatively titled Brown Peril, unearths the transnational, imperial, and relational forces that shape the emergence of anti-brownness as a powerful form of racism in U.S. public culture.

Assistant Professor, Rhetoric, Media, & Culture

Rianna Walcott (Ph.D., King’s College London) researches Black (and British) communication practices across social media platforms with different demographics, and how different social network service affordances influence how Black users interact. She combines digital research, Black feminist praxis, decolonial studies, arts and culture, and mental health advocacy in her work.

Dr. Walcott founded projectmyopia.com, a LAHP-funded digital humanities and arts project that promotes inclusivity in academia and decolonised curricula, and was co-editor of 'The Colour of Madness', an anthology about mental health inequities faced by people of colour in Britain.

Assistant Professor, Communication

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