[5] Giles was educated at Brentwood School in Essex, and then did his B.A in English at Christ Church, Oxford in 1979, graduating with First Class honours.
[13] In a 2019 address to the English Language and Literature Association of Korea, Giles suggested that civil wars might be perceived as precursors to transnational understandings of a national body.
An article by him argues that historic treatments of romanticism have, more often than not, overlooked the complicated ways in which transpacific space enters into Romantic poetics and how those aesthetic constructions have molded global political imaginaries.
[15] He has also discussed the academic institutionalization of English studies as a comparatively recent phenomenon, something that occurred many centuries after the establishment of the Classics, and he explains how the subject's fast expansion happened after World War II.
[16] In another article, he suggested a new scholarly direction in the field of American Studies as he outlined the specific challenges and opportunities that come with teaching such a course within an Australian context.
Philip Mead in the Australian Book Review said "Two of the bravura readings at the centre of this study are of Thomas Mann and Eleanor Dark.
It describes the way in which literary traditions are formed within each national culture and their deep dependency upon negotiations with each other's transatlantic counterpart.
Lance Newman in his review praised the book and said that “This is the kind of sensitively historicist approach we need to understand the period’s complex and fluid co-evolution of British and American literary cultures and national identities.”[19] In Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution of U. S. Literature, Giles talks about how the formation of American literature has been affected by Australia and New Zealand since the eighteenth century.
It discusses how the antipodes, as a historical fact and a philosophical idea, influenced American writers in the territory that came to be called Australasia after the British settlement of this South Pacific region.
[21] His book The Global Remapping of American Literature lays out how the cartographies of the field, as an institutional category, have fluctuated across different times and spaces.
But more importantly, Giles has achieved the rare feat of reorienting the cultural landscape in such a way that it will be hard to read the literature of this century in quite the same manner again.”[24]