In particular, we extend our sincere condolences to his family, his closest friends, fellow researchers and former students, and we join in the collective feeling of loss and longing.

Nelson Traquina was a Full Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences at NOVA FCSH, where he taught since the early 1980s and was awarded the chair in 1997.
He was a correspondent in Portugal for the United Press International (UPI) news agency, having arrived in the country in the aftermath of the April revolution, after an academic career in the United States (BA in International Politics at Assumption College and MA in International Politics at the University of Denver) and France (Diploma in Social Communication and Politics at the University of Paris I and PhD in Sociology at the University of Paris V).

Nelson Traquina was one of the most important and prolific researchers in the field of journalism studies in Portugal – we owe him the elements for a theory of news that helped us understand why “the news is the way it is”, the subtitle of one of his books (Teorias do Jornalismo, Volume I, 2004).
Studies on journalism in Portugal and Brazil are immensely indebted to Nelson Traquina’s contribution.

He was the first Portuguese academic to systematize thinking about the political structure of news as symbolic goods and to conceive of journalism as both a professional practice and a field of study and reflection.
His many students, both Portuguese and Brazilian, will always be grateful for the initiation into reading seminal authors in the field of communication sciences, most of whom were unknown at the time Nelson Traquina began organizing collections of these texts and discussing them in the seminars on News Theory at the then Master’s Degree in Social Communication at Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

The anthology Journalism: Issues, Theories and Stories (1993) quickly became a classic, featuring 20 key authors, including Philip Schlesinger, Stuart Hall, David Manning White, Gaye Tuchman, David Moloch and Marilyn Lester, Michael Shudson, Daniel Hallin and others.
Several of these academics later came to NOVA FCSH to take part in seminars and conferences organized by Professor Nelson Traquina.
We would particularly highlight the various editions of the Media, Journalism and Democracy seminar, organized by CIMJ, a pioneering research center in the field of media and journalism studies, founded by Nelson Traquina in 1997 and which today has become ICNOVA, after merging with CECL.

The board and members of ICNOVA join in these heartfelt words of tribute to a professor who was dedicated and esteemed by all, a tireless producer and disseminator of science and knowledge, a pioneering researcher and a generous and remarkable man, to whom the Department of Communication Sciences at NOVA FCSH and hundreds of people owe a decisive contribution to his academic and human formation.

For those who didn’t get to know him so closely, we leave here the testimony of two colleagues – Rogério Santos and Isabel Ferin – written at the time we paid tribute to Professor Nelson Traquina, which resulted in the book Pesquisa em Media e Jornalismo (organized by Isabel Ferin Cunha, Ana Cabrera, Jorge Pedro Sousa), published in 2012 and available in open access through the link http://www.labcom-ifp.ubi.pt/livro/90.

See “Nelson Traquina, a journey dedicated to the media and journalism” by Rogério Santos.

A testimony from a former student – Eunice Lourenço, current editor-in-chief of Rádio Renascença:
Farewell ‘Proféssor’, Renascença online, September 28, 2019.
https://rr.sapo.pt/2019/09/28/eunice-lourenco/adeus-professor/artigo/166297/

“But he also brought the same spirit of prophecy to what is the opera magna of his existence: the impressive bridge (I feel like writing “impossible bridge”) that he, almost marginally, draws between the field of faith and that of reason, between liturgy and poetics, between rule and desire.
For some reason, he has never been a comfortable creator, either for the Catholic camp or for the parameters of the dominant culture.
Believers’ ears were only willing to open, because he operated with an unusual and demanding grammar, looking for living metaphors, which is to say, new metaphors.
In the same way, he never got the visibility he certainly deserves from the culture.

“His poetry is, for example, liturgical, something that in Portugal is immediately classified as a minor genre. And some of his most fundamental texts are homilies: well, the last homilies that Portuguese culture heard were those of Father António Vieira! Perhaps one day we’ll recognize the originality and milestone of this man and be able to value what he has left us today. For now we feel the great emptiness that his death represents, which, as the title of his first book of poems points out, we are challenged to live as a ‘Green Emptiness’.”

This beautiful note speaks for itself, and we can say little more than Tolentino Mendonça’s words.
We’ll just add a few curriculum notes.

José Augusto Mourão was an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the New University of Lisbon.
He was also a researcher at CECL – Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Linguagens and a board member of RCL – Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens.
At the university, he taught Semiotics, E-textualities and Hyperfiction and Culture in the Department of Communication Sciences, and was a lecturer in all three cycles of studies.
He was also a member of the Executive Committee of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (since 1999).

But Professor José Augusto Mourão also had another dimension of enormous importance as part of his activity as a Dominican.
In this capacity, he was President of the St. Thomas Aquinas Institute, a member of the Permanent Commission for the Promotion of Studies in the Order of Preachers (since 2007) and a member of the National Secretariat for the Pastoral Care of Culture (2010).

At the crossroads of both activities, Professor José Augusto Mourão wrote poetry, translated and published several books, mainly as part of his academic activity.

page dedicated to José Augusto Mourão: http://www.triplov.com/semas/