Journalism Safety: Legal Protections, Physical Safety and Political Threats.

Emilia Șercan is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Journalism and Communication Science; Department of Journalism, within the University of Bucharest and investigative journalist with 24 years of experience. In 2015 Șercan published her doctoral thesis, The cult of secrecy. The Censorship Mechanisms in the Communist Press, Polirom Publishing House, and in 2017 she published the book Doctorates Factory: or How to Destroy a Nation’s Fundamentals, Humanitas Publishing House.
She earned several scholarships, both as professor and journalist: scholar of the State Department of the United States of America, Study of the U.S. Institutes for Scholars (SUSI) at Ohio University (2016); doctoral scholar of the French State at the University Standhal Grenoble 3, France (2012 – 2013); Erasmus scholar, professor mobility week in the Department of Communication, Media and Culture, Panteion University, Athens, Greece (2017); Erasmus scholar, professor mobility week in the Department of Journalism, Faculty of Information Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain (2014); Freedom House Fellow in the United States of America (2004).
As an investigative journalist, she exposed tens of plagiarism cases in doctoral thesis of Romanian top politicians or public figures and published more than 4.000 of journalistic investigations, interviews, analysis, editorials and news. She won several academic and professional prizes: Journalist of the Year (2016), the Prize for Freedom of Expression (2016), “Ion Rațiu” Prize for Journalism (2016), Professor of the Year (2017), the Prize “Nicolae Iorga” of the Romanian Society of Historical Sciences, European Network for Academic Integrity Award (ENAI) (2019), the Social Dialogue Group Award (2020), the 2020 award of the Association Initiative for European Democratic Culture and the International Anti-Corruption Day reward from U.S. Embassy in Romania (2020).