2016 Arhu Leadership Appointments

Congratulations to the new leaders in the College of Arts and Humanities.

From: Bonnie Thornton Dill, Dean

Date: March 11, 2016

Re: Leadership Appointments

I am pleased to announce the following leadership appointments within the College of Arts and Humanities:

Shawn J. Parry-Giles is serving as chair of the Department of Communication. Her term runs from January 1, 2016 through June 30, 2018.

Parry-Giles also serves as director of the University of Maryland's Center for Political Communication and Civic Leadership, which aims to promote democratic deliberation, civic engagement and citizen education in political life.

Parry-Giles’s teaching and research interests center on rhetoric and political culture with a focus on the study of the presidency. She is the author of "Hillary Clinton in the News: Gender and Authenticity in American Politics,” which explores the construction of authenticity and gender norms by the news media in the media's coverage of Clinton from her time as first lady through her time as presidential candidate in 2008. It received the Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award. She also authored “The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 1945-1955,” named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. She also co- authored “Constructing Clinton: Hyperreality and Presidential Image-Making in Postmodern Politics” and “The Prime-Time Presidency: The West Wing and U.S. Nationalism.” Most recently, Parry-Giles co-authored a forthcoming book entitled, "Lincoln Reminiscences: Republican and Democratic Conceptions of American Citizenship." Parry-Giles is co-editor of “The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address” and co-editor of the online journal, Voices of Democracy, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Parry-Giles earned her doctorate in communication from the Department of Speech Communication at Indiana University.

Robyn Muncy is serving as interim chair of the Department of Women’s Studies. Her term began January 1, 2016.

Muncy is a professor of history and affiliate faculty member of women’s studies. Her research and teaching focus on women, social policy and social movements in the twentieth-century United States.

Her first book, “Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935,” examines the role middle-class women played in creating the United States welfare state. Her most recent book uses the biography of progressive reformer Josephine Roche to explore progressive politics in the

United States from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s. She is currently working on a book that will analyze the role of women in the Great Society, a series of domestic programs initiated by Lyndon B. Johnson that aimed to end poverty and injustice in the United States.

Muncy has won many grants and teaching awards. She was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars from 2007 to 2008. In 2009, she returned to the Wilson Center as a public policy scholar. She was also the winner of a 1989 National Endowment for the

Humanities Summer Stipend and a 2004 research grant from the Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library.

Muncy earned her doctorate in United States history from Northwestern University.

Taras Matla is serving as assistant director of the University of Maryland Art Gallery, where he manages the day-to-day operations of the gallery and oversees a permanent collection of nearly 2,300 works of art.

Matla joined the University of Maryland in November 2012. During his term, the gallery’s permanent collection has grown to include work by video art pioneers John Baldessari and Chip Lord, two significant paintings by Paul Reed from the 1960s and numerous examples of early Korean art.

Before becoming the assistant director of the gallery, Matla held curatorial and public relations positions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The J. Paul Getty Trust, respectively. Matla earned a Master of Arts in aesthetics and politics from the California Institute of the Arts, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking from California State University, Long Beach, and has more than 10 years of experience working in museums and the art world.

Please join me in congratulating our new leaders in the College of Arts and Humanities. I would also like to take this opportunity to offer my warm thanks to the chairs and directors who made important transitions in their careers: former Department of Communication Chair Elizabeth Toth, who continues to serve as a professor in the department; former Director of the University of Maryland Art Gallery John Shipman, who is now executive director of the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts; and former Chair of the Department of Women’s Studies Seung-kyung Kim, who is now the Korea Foundation chair in Korean Studies and director of Indiana University’s Institute on Korean Studies.