Foreign Language

french

Education

• Ph.D., University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 1974
• M.A., University of Rochester, 1971
• B.A., Smith College, 1970

Bio

Dr. Patricia W. Cummins (Virginia Commonwealth University) is President of the Africa Business and Entrepreneurship Research Society, Inc. An expert in Business French and language for special purposes, she teaches interdisciplinary courses on French West Africa, the European Union, intercultural communication, and language and identity.  She hosts workshops for U.S. language teachers, organizes American Language and Civilization Workshops for international teachers and learners of English, and solicits public and private funding for grants and contracts, most recently in Africa. Her grants and contracts often fund other VCU faculty and students as well as those at other institutions.

As Chair of the Richmond Sister Cities Commission 2012-17, and again as a commissioner in 2021-26, she has encouraged economic development and international collaboration among higher education institutions as well as joint sponsorship of conferences, like the award-winning 2013 Women, War & Peace in Africa conference and the 2017 Africa Business Conference.  She has published 6 books and over 60 articles, and her workshops on language for business and professional purposes and on intercultural communication were delivered in settings throughout Europe and North America, as well as in West Africa, China, Japan, India, and Iran.  Her 2020 Council of European Studies article outlined the future of European Studies and higher education reform in Africa in parallel with reforms in the European Union.

In Summer 2025 she was funded by the U.S. Department of State to help build a bilingual campus in Côte d’Ivoire.  She is a strong promoter of virtual collaboration in higher education (VE/ COIL), and her students benefit from her research when they participate in Virtual Exchanges in her classes, where students in North America work with students in French-speaking Europe and Africa. Her 2025 article in Routledge’s Handbook of Research on World Language Instruction focuses on Curriculum 2 Careers. Her 2026 chapters in the Springer Handbook of Using Virtual Exchange across Disciplines: Building Global Citizens from Home involve a variety of virtual collaborations involving the U.S., France, West Africa, and North Africa. Dr. Cummins gives seminars on intercultural communication in Africa and Europe, and she and her partners in the Africa Business and Entrepreneurship Research Society are committed to promoting UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in collaboration with university partners.