Regional Vice Presidents

Ann Springer and Scott Springer
Co-Vice Presidents Western United States
Brigham Young University-Hawaii
Term: 2024-2027

color head and shoulders photo of Caucasian couple with bright Aloha smiles

Ann Springer and Scott Springer are faculty members in the Business Management program at Brigham Young University—Hawaii in Laie, Hawaii on the island of Oahu. Ann and Scott co-hosted the ABC Western Region Conference on the BYU-Hawaii campus in February 2023. Co-hosting the conference was just one example of many professional collaborations for Ann and Scott throughout their careers. They also have co-presented at academic conferences, co-authored several academic journal articles, and previously co-owned a marketing and public relations business. For several years they also served as co-directors of the Pacific Region of the BYU Management Society, a worldwide organization that promotes moral and ethical leadership, while simultaneously serving as faculty advisors of the BYU Management Society student chapter on the BYU-Hawaii campus.

As Co-Regional Vice Presidents of the Western Region, Ann and Scott share the decision-making and regular responsibilities of the region while jointly working to increase commitment and unity of the region’s members. They rotate the responsibility of representing the region and voting at ABC board meetings. 

Ann, an assistant professor at BYU-Hawaii, teaches courses in business communication and marketing. She has published and presented research on diversity and inclusion teaching methods for successful outcomes in business communication. She is currently conducting research in marketing employment opportunities in developing countries. Ann has worked in business development, marketing, and public relations for two decades in both the private and public sectors. Her experience and education crosses multiple industries, including health care, corporate communications, non-profits, and leadership. She holds an MBA in healthcare management and leadership.

Scott, an associate professor of organizational leadership, teaches courses in business communication, leadership, and management. His research interests include the experiences of first-time managers and managerial communication. Prior to joining the BYU-Hawaii faculty, Scott worked for 15 years as a global director in the academic publishing industry. He holds a doctorate in higher education administration from Northeastern University and an MBA in leadership and organizational change from Pepperdine University.


Valerie Creelman
Vice President Canada
Saint Mary's University
Term: 2019-2027

 
color head and shoulders photo of Caucasian woman Valerie CreelmanDr. Creelman is an Associate Professor of Business Communications within the Marketing and Business Communications Department at Saint Mary’s Sobey School of Business in Halifax, Nova Scotia. As a long-time ABC member and former associate dean at the Sobey School, she will use her leadership experience and knowledge of ABC operations to serve and represent the multiple audiences that make up our growing membership within the Canadian region. She can be counted on to advance our Strategic Plan’s priorities and continue to strengthen ABC’s profile as an international organization of dedicated researchers, teachers, and practitioners working within our universities, colleges, and industries in the areas of rhetoric, professional writing, and business communication.

An ABC member since 2007 and a regular presenter at our annual conferences, Valerie recently served on the ABC Board of Directors as a Director at Large. In 2015, she volunteered to co-chair ABC’s 80th annual conference in Seattle, Washington. A member of the Rhetoric Special Interest Group and the ABC Research Committee, she has served on the adjudication committees for the Kitty O. Locker Outstanding Researcher Award and the Outstanding Dissertation Award. At the 2017 annual conference in Dublin, Ireland, she received ABC’s Rising Star Award in recognition of her dedicated service to ABC and her research and teaching contributions to the discipline.

In 2015, Valerie received the Full-time Professor of the Year Award for Teaching Excellence from the Sobey School of Business Commerce Society. In 2013, Saint Mary’s awarded her the Dr. Geraldine Thomas Educational Leadership Award. To date, she has taught a variety of communications courses and developed modules for executive education and management training programs, including those for Nunavut Tunngavik, Inc. (NTI) and the Government of Nunavut.

A graduate of the University of Waterloo’s PhD Program, Valerie’s academic background is in rhetoric, discourse studies, and professional writing. Her latest research projects focus on digital discourse, online customer care, crisis communication, and impression management. Her publications have appeared in Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, and she is a contributing author to the following publications: Digital Business Discourse (Ed. Erika Darics, Palgrave, 2015); Advertising, Consumer Culture & Canadian Society (Ed. Kyle Asquith, Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2018); and Rhetorical Theory and Praxis in the Business Communication Classroom (Eds. Kristen Getchell & Paula Lentz, Routledge, forthcoming 2018). Within Canada, Valerie has attended and presented her research at conferences organized by the Canadian Communications Association, the Canadian Association of Discourse and Writing, the Atlantic Schools of Business, and the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada. Her research and views on business communication have also been featured in the Globe and Mail’s Business Education section.

Committed to growing ABC’s Canadian membership, forging ABC alliances with Canadian associations, and making ABC’s conferences a destination for the innovative research of Canadian graduate students and established scholars alike, Valerie welcomes the opportunity to serve our Canadian members’ interests as their regional representative in the years ahead.

Vice President Asia and the Pacific
Toyo University
Term: 2024-2027

 
color head and shoulders photo of Asian woman Yunxia Zhu

Misa Fujio, PhD, is Professor in the Faculty of Business Administration and President of the Research Institute of Social Sciences at Toyo University, Japan. She obtained her PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Tokyo, after an earlier professional career in American-based global companies. Her research interests include intercultural communication, business discourse analysis and internationalization of Japanese universities. For the past 10 years, she has led several projects funded by MEXT (the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan), including projects to investigate the abilities needed for globally-minded leaders and to examine mandatory English policy in Japanese organizations both in university and corporate sectors.

She has attended almost all ABC Asia-Pacific conferences since 2000, when the conference was conducted at Doshisha University in Japan, and ABC annual conferences since 2012 held in Hawaii as a presenter or a panelist. She also joined the Europe, Africa, and Middle East regional conferences held in Cape Town in 2016 and Naples last year. For the past few years when on-line sessions became more mainstream, she joined the Asia-Pacific regional panel with other prominent researchers from Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, China, Korea, and so on.

She is an award-winning scholar and her recent publications include "Harmonious Disagreement in Japanese Business Discourse” (Chapter 4 of Discourse Perspectives on Organizational Communication), a publication which received the ABC Distinguished Publication Award in 2012; "The Role of Linguistic Ability and Business Expertise for Turn-taking in Intercultural Business Communication" in The GABC Journal (based on her paper presentation which won the Best Paper Award at the Fifth Annual Tricontinental Conference of GABC); “Challenging facing globally-minded leaders in a Japanese-European joint venture company” in the BCRP Journal (Business Communication Research and Practice), which also received the JBCA Academic Award (Japan Business Communication Association) in 2020. She is a reviewer of both Japanese and overseas journals, including the JBCA, BCRP, GABC mentioned above and LSP International Journal. She is a former Executive Director of JBCA, and the current Chapter President (Tokyo.)

Barbara Bolt
University of South Carolina
Vice President Southeastern United States
Term: 2023-2027

I have been actively involved with ABC since 2019 when I attended the conference in Detroit. The collegial atmosphere and the variety of communication professionals all gathered together was both refreshing and stimulating. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, I joined a group started by then-SE Regional VP Patty Harms. This group met online almost weekly throughout the spring semester to share strategies for coping in the new teaching environment. The following year, we opened the group to anyone in ABC, christened it the Teaching Circle, and established a format for presentations online. Since Fall 2022, the Teaching Circle has met quarterly, and I have been serving as co-chair with Jenna Haugen of UNC. We have formalized the presentation proposal process and continue to recruit speakers from the Circle to facilitate sharing ideas and instructional techniques, as well as to amplify the sense of community.

As Regional Vice President, I am interested in growing the ABC membership of the SE Region via direct outreach by current members. Further, based on the successful regional conferences from the past, I would like to bolster the SE Region conference by encouraging participation from SE Region members who may not have the time or resources to attend the international conference. In this way, members will experience the benefits of the international conference on a smaller scale. The regional gathering can act as a gateway to participating in the larger conference.

Lucia Sigmar
Vice President Southwestern United States
Stephen F. Austin State University
Term: 2020-2024

Lucia S. Sigmar is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, where she teaches courses in business communication, managerial communication, presentation skills, and intercultural communication.  She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from Delta State University, a Master of Arts Degree in English from the University of Southern Mississippi, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Tennessee.  Dr. Sigmar is a member of the Association for Business Communication and serves on the Publications Board. She is a past-president of the Association of Business Communication-Southwest Region.  Her work is published in refereed journals and proceedings, and she has served as program chair, track chair, session chair, discussant, and reviewer at regional, national, and international conferences. 

Dr. Sigmar has been teaching since 1981 at the secondary level, in the college classroom, and in the non-profit and corporate sectors.  As a college administrator at Roane State Community College (RSCC), she was responsible for operating the RSCC’s Writing Center, a Tennessee Center of Emphasis. She managed three campus facilities, hired and trained staff, and also matched the department’s state funding with income from outside sources.  In conjunction with the Continuing Education Department, she developed the curricula for a highly successful series of training programs in technical, professional writing, and social and emotional intelligence for business and industry in RSCC’s nine-county service area.  Her clients included Boeing, Martin-Marietta, Lockheed-Martin, and Kimberly-Clark, to name a few.  She has lived, worked, and traveled abroad, primarily in Europe. 

She also served as Communications Coordinator for the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild, a non-profit arts organization in Asheville, North Carolina, representing eleven states of the Appalachian region.  In that role, she promoted the Guild and its members in radio and television interviews, publications and press releases, gallery openings and educational programming, and public relations efforts throughout the Guild’s service area. 

Dr. Sigmar is a professional artist specializing in watercolor, tempera, and oil painting in the style of the Old Dutch Masters.

 

Kristen Getchell
Vice President Eastern United States
Babson College
Term 2021-2025

color head and shoulders photo of Caucasian woman Kristen Getchell

Kristen Getchell is an associate professor of business communication at Babson College in Wellesley, MA. She teaches graduate and undergraduate business communication courses in Babson's Marketing Division.  She also teaches executive education courses in management communication and executive presence.   

She has been a member of the Association since 2016.  For the past year, she served as Chair of the Rhetoric SIG.  Currently, she is part of a working project to expand the conversation around social justice and business communication.  

Her scholarly work has appeared in publications including Teaching English in the Two-Year College (NCTE), Reader, Business Horizons, International Journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.  She is the co-editor, with Paula Lentz, of a recent collection from Routledge titled Rhetorical Theory and Praxis in the Business Communication Classroom, a winner of the 2019 Association for Business Communication Distinguished Book of the Year award. Her research interests include how history, rhetorical theory, and genre theory inform business communication research, teaching, and disciplinarity.  Her current book project (with Jim Dubinsky, Routledge) is a social history of business communication education in American colleges.

Paula Lentz
Vice President Midwestern United States
University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
Term: 2022-2025

color head and shoulders photo of Caucasian woman Paula LentzDr. Paula Lentz is a professor of business communication in the Business Communication Department at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire’s College of Business, director of the college’s Student Professional Development Program, and academic director of the UW MBA Consortium Program. As the academic program coordinator for business communication, she administers the Advanced Business Communication Certificate, manages the operations of the Business Writing and Presentations Studio, and teaches at the undergraduate and graduate level. As the academic director of the UW MBA Consortium, she oversees the administration of the curriculum, manages the program assessment process and reporting, and works with MBA faculty to address student issues. Read more at: https://www.uwec.edu/profiles/ginderpj/.

Her research interests include teaching business communication, rhetoric, discourse analysis, and genre theory. She has published in several journals, including The Journal of Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, International Journal of Business Communication, and the International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. In addition, she is co-author of several textbooks with Kathy Rentz, including Business Communication: A Problem-Solving Approach, and is the co-author, along with Kristen Getchell, of Rhetorical Theory and Praxis in the Business Communication Classroom, which received the Association for Business Communication’s Distinguished Book Award in 2019. She has also won ABC’s Meada Gibbs Outstanding Teacher-Scholar Award and the Francis Weeks Award of Merit. At UW-Eau Claire, she has received the UW MBA Consortium’s Outstanding Teacher Award for its module courses and the College of Business’s coaching award.

A member of ABC for many years, she currently serves as a director-at-large and she chairs the ABC’s Academic Environment Committee, which advocates for business communication faculty, the importance of business communication curricula, and the increased visibility of business communication as an academic discipline. She is also a member of and has chaired ABC’s Rhetoric Special Interest Group and has presented at many international and Midwestern U.S. regional ABC conferences. As a member of ABC’s Midwestern region, she most recently served on a faculty panel for its “Research in Business Communication: Making Connections and Looking Toward the Future” symposium and served as a panelist/presenter at the Midwestern region’s Asking the Right Questions: Laying a Strong Foundation for Qualitative Business Communication Research” symposium.

Ursula Lutzky
Vice President Europe, Africa and Middle East
Vienna University of Economics and Business
Term: 2022-2025
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Dr. Ursula Lutzky is an Associate Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, where she is a member of the Institute for English Business Communication and Deputy Head of the Institute for Communication Management and Media.

Ursula’s teaching and research are infused by the foundational role that language and communication play in our everyday lives and in particular in business practice. She has taught (business) communication classes at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, and she has been involved in PhD supervision as well as examination at different universities in Europe, including Liverpool, Lund and Ghent. She is also a Senior Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy.

Ursula’s core research interests include business communication, discourse studies and pragmatics. Her recent work has focused on the study of large corpora of digital discourse, such as blogs and microblogs. Her monograph The Discourse of Customer Service Tweets (2021, Bloomsbury) explores the linguistic and communicative features used by companies and their customers when engaging in customer service interactions on Twitter.

In August 2021, Ursula organized the ABC Regional Conference Vienna, where she and her team were able to facilitate academic exchange and bring together colleagues from across the world to share their passion and discuss business communication research.

Ana Lucia Magalhaes
Vice President Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America
Term: 2022-2025

 

Ana Lucia Magalhaes smiling in her office

Dr. Ana Lucia Magalhaes is Program Coordinator of FATEC, a network of 71 community colleges owned and operated by the State of Sao Paulo. She is a member of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, the Brazilian Society of Classical Studies, the Brazilian Association of Corporate Communications, and both the Mexican Association of Rhetoric and the Argentinean Association of Rhetoric. She teaches Business Communication and Research Methodology at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Ana’s research interest focuses mostly on rhetoric and discourse analysis. Her doctoral thesis covered serious aircraft accident communications by a major airline, with focus on company ethos. Her recent research work included a deep systematic study of ethos, logos and pathos in communications, as well as applications of rhetoric in the classroom.

Ana is presently Chief Editor of H-TEC, a scholarly magazine covering both technology and humanities, and editor of International Journal of Active Learning. She has been very active at PCI, a program that fosters international collaborative bi-national projects by students.