On October 2, Dr. Alina Dolea, Fulbright Scholar in the academic year 2015-2016, at Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, received the EUPRERA PhD Award for Excellent Doctoral Theses. This is a bi-annual prize aimed to stimulate the academic discussion and build the body of knowledge in communication management across Europe. The jury, headed by Prof. em. Dr. Betteke van Ruler (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands) and Prof. em. Dr. Günter Bentele (University of Leipzig, Germany), selected as winning thesis: “Country promotion as a public issue in Romania after 1989 – A social constructivist and interdisciplinary approach”, by Alina Dolea, tutored by Prof. Camelia Beciu from the University of Bucharest, Romania. “In the light of upcoming attention to nations, the topic of the thesis is very relevant. It is studied not only in communication studies but also in political science, economy and sociology. Alina Dolea describes clearly all relevant theoretical approaches in well written chapters. She develops her own interdisciplinary and social constructivist approach to country promotion, instead of the often used functionalistic approach. Overall, the thesis is very well written, the literature review is impressive, the empirical part is amazing and shows that this constructivist approach really builds new ways for analyzing country promotion”.

The European Public Relations Education and Research Association (EUPRERA) is a body of academic institutions, researchers and senior professionals in the field of strategic communication with 500 members from 40 countries. More details on the award can be found here.

Also in October 2015, Dr. Dolea was elected Secretary of the Public Relations Division of the International Communication Association (ICA) that aims to advance the scholarly study of human communication by encouraging and facilitating excellence in academic research worldwide and gathers over 2,300 scholars all over the world at its annual conferences. Members of the Public Relations Division are concerned with developing a greater understanding of the theoretic basis for effective communication through both laboratory and practice of communication between organizations and specific publics.