Gordon Mitchell Email & Phone Number

Appointed to the Pitt faculty in 1995, Assistant Dean Mitchell joined the Honors College in 2014 after having previously served as Chair of the Department of Communication, Associate Director of the Humanities Center, Director of the William Pitt Debating Union and Deputy Director of the Matthew B. Ridgway Center for International Security Studies.Assistant Dean Mitchell’s research program focuses on rhetoric and argumentation, especially in medical, military and educational contexts. He is author of the award winning book, Strategic Deception, co-editor of Hitting First and has published over 40 articles and book chapters in leading scholarly outlets. Mitchell’s work on missile defense has been presented at invited talks in venues such as the World Policy Institute; the Belgian Royal Defence College and the US Congress, while his scholarship on intelligence analysis has been featured in nationally syndicated Op-Eds and official government reports.Mitchell is recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the David and Tina Bellet Teaching Excellence Award and has directed 12 PhD dissertations and served on over 30 doctoral committees. In his 21 years as a debate educator, Mitchell’s teams won three national championships and he convened hundreds of public debates on topics such as global warming, network neutrality, Marcellus Shale drilling, abstinence-only sex education, county government structure, human rights amnesty and transportation funding. As an undergraduate student debater at Northwestern University, Mitchell was half of the top-ranked two-person team in the nation in 1988 and the top individual speaker at the 1989 National Debate Tournament.Trained in high school and college as a sportswriter, Assistant Dean Mitchell subscribes to Sports Illustrated, enjoys sweep rowing on Pittsburgh’s resplendent three rivers, and is a world record-holding rock skipper.

Listed skills include Community Outreach, Research, Politics, Rhetoric, and 8 others.