The AMA is pleased to announce that four new members will join the Academic Council in July 2024: Linda Alkire, Kelly Hewett, Girish Mallapragada, and Adam Rapp. In addition, present member Kay Peters will join the Executive Committee for the term 2025–2029.
Linda Alkire
Linda Alkire (née Nasr) is Associate Professor, Department of Marketing, at Texas State University. She earned her PhD from the University of Manchester, UK, where she was awarded the highly competitive and prestigious Manchester Business School Doctoral Studentship. Alkire received an MBA (Highest Distinction) from the Lebanese American University (Lebanon) and a BA in Business Marketing (Highest Distinction) from Notre Dame University (Lebanon). Alkire currently teaches Professional Selling and Services Marketing at the Texas State University McCoy College of Business. Before Texas State, Alkire was an Assistant Professor at the University of Manchester, UK.
Alkire’s research interests include transformative service research (TSR), service and sales Strategy, and technology and service. Through her global and sustained research efforts, Alkire has gained an international reputation and is among the thought leaders in the area of TSR. In particular, Alkire embraces transdisciplinary research seeking to contribute to the well-being of society by offering transformative insights to service providers.
Alkire has published more than 30 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, including Journal of Service Research, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Journal of International Marketing, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Journal of Service Management, International Journal of Bank Marketing, Journal of Services Marketing, The Service Industries Journal, AMS Review, and others.
Kelly Hewett
Kelly Hewett is Professor of Marketing, Reagan Professor of Business, and Haslam Family Faculty Research Fellow at the University of Tennessee’s Haslam College of Business. She also serves as Editor in Chief of Journal of International Marketing. Prior to joining UT, she worked for five years at Bank of America, where she was a senior vice president in the firm’s corporate marketing group. Previously, she had a ten-year academic career and also held prior positions in international marketing and marketing research. Kelly’s research has been published in Journal of Marketing, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and Journal of International Marketing, among others.
Kelly has received numerous awards and recognitions for her research, teaching, and service. She has served as a Corporate Trustee for the Marketing Science Institute, and as a member of the boards for the AMA’s Marketing Strategy and Global Marketing Special Interest Groups. She currently leads several abroad experiences for both graduate and undergraduate students, teaches a Ph.D. seminar on marketing strategy, and teaches in UT’s full-time, Executive, and Professional MBA programs.
Girish Mallapragada
Girish Mallapragada is Associate Professor of Marketing, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. Girish’s research interests include open innovation, social networks, new product development, and interfirm relationships. His research has appeared in Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. He is an editorial review board member at Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and Customer Needs and Solutions.
Mallapragada teaches the MBA Marketing Core course at the Kelley School of Business. Before joining academia, he worked as an Customer Relationship Manager at Pramati Technologies Pvt. Ltd., an enterprise infrastructure software vendor, setting up and managing their sales office in Bangalore, India. He was a graduate summer intern at Coca Cola India Pvt. Ltd., in Surat, India.
Adam Rapp
Adam Rapp is Executive Director and Ralph and Luci Schey Professor of Sales at Ohio University. Prior to joining the faculty at Ohio, he was the D. Paul Jones and Charlene Jones Endowed Chair in Services Marketing at University of Alabama. Previously, Adam was an assistant professor at Clemson University and Kent State University. Rapp is also a visiting lecturer at the Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School in Belgium, University of Eastern Finland, and the Athens University of Economics and Business and the ALBA School in Greece. He has a PhD from University of Connecticut, an MBA from Villanova University, and an undergraduate degree from Penn State.
Rapp’s research examines factors influencing the performance of sales people, sales teams and sales organizations. He looks at how to improve sales person performance and the knowledge, skills, abilities and behaviors that can contribute to becoming more effective. His work also touches on how to take a relational approach or consultative approach to selling.
He has published in Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Business Research, and Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management. Rapp’s work on sales teams has been highlighted by professional selling textbooks and industry magazines and has been presented at Harvard University.
Kay Peters
Kay Peters is SVI-endowed Chair of Dialog Marketing and Professor of Marketing at Hamburg University, Germany. He has held a visiting position at University of California Davis since 2010.
His research focuses on advanced dynamics in communication, customer centricity, and international marketing. Since 2010, he has expanded his research to cover sustainability, digital transformation, and startups, and since 2019 his research has expanded into the latest AI advances. Most of his research originates from intense interaction and implementation projects with industry practice.
His work has appeared in Journal of Marketing Research and International Journal of Research in Marketing among other scholarly outlets, some as lead articles or being recognized with a best paper award. He has served and continues to serve on the editorial boards of most premier marketing journals (e.g., Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, IJRM, Journal of Retailing). Currently he is an area editor at IJRM as well as a Special Issue Coeditor at Journal of International Marketing and Journal of Business Research. He organized the 2019 EMAC conference (ca. 1,000 attendees) and the 2016 Marketing Dynamics Conference (MDC) at the University of Hamburg. He also co-hosted the MDC conferences 2022 at GSU (Atlanta) and 2023 at Northeastern University (Boston). He has served on MDC’s Advisory Board since 2016.
Peters has been a member of the American Marketing Association Academic Council since 2022 and the Advisory Board of ISMS (INFORMS) since 2023.
About the AMA Academic Council
The AMA Academic Council is a 12-member council that represents the diversity of scholarly interests in managerial, behavioral, modeling, and public policy perspectives with attention to strategic marketing implications. The AMA strives to be the most relevant force and voice shaping marketing around the world; an essential community for marketers.
In support of that mission, the AMA Academic Council advocates for the AMA academic membership and provides stewardship of Academic Special Interest Groups (SIGs), events, and related initiatives.