On November 3-4, 2023, the University of Bucharest celebrated the 160th anniversary of its Faculty of Letters and the 30th anniversary of its Department of Communication. On this special occasion, EUPRERA was invited to a session dedicated to professor Adela Rogojinaru, past executive director of the association, who passed away too early in 2014.

Professor Rogojinaru has been a member of EUPRERA since 2005. She was a vivid academic. Her field of expertise covered PR methodologies and applications, corporate communication and culture, CSR, and issues management.

Her commitment to EUPRERA and to the PR community has been very concrete since the beginning. In 2007, she applied to host the EUPRERA annual congress in Bucharest, which took place in 2009 on the theme “Corporate citizens of the third millennium. Towards a Shared European Perspective”. Adela has been a brilliant congress organiser and everybody still remembers the good time we had.

Not much later, precisely in 2010, our members elected Adela as executive director of the association. After a first 2-year mandate, our members renewed their trust in Adela, appointing her for another 2 years. In total, she played this role for almost 4 years, during which approximately 40 Board meetings took place. Here, every time Adela brought inspirational thoughts and concrete actions, under the keyword of inclusion: inclusion of young generations of scholars and of scholars from all the countries, including the soft-currency ones.

Thanks to Adela, today we still apply a 50% discount on the membership fee for members from soft-currency countries. Alongside it, the attention to young generations of scholars has been kept as a focus: we encouraged and welcomed proposals from early and mid-career academics, who are now grouped in a recently born network of more than 50 colleagues.

However, this is not enough to describe Adela’s participation in the EUPRERA community. Gatherings at our annual congresses had a special spark thanks to her lively presence. Together we talked, we laughed, we danced, and we compared our experiences. She offered a wider view to the EUPRERA Board. Our association was founded in 2000 and in those years it started to expand, to go beyond the northern-central European area. Adela’s wider view has been a gift to EUPRERA.

Today we couldn’t be happier not only to have the University of Bucharest among our members, but also to see our 25th annual congress taking place exactly here in 2024.

This speech was delivered in Bucharest on November 3rd, 2023, by Virginia Villa, outgoing director of PR and administration.