College and remained in that position until his retirement in 2008. In that function, he organized symposiums on themes varying from the diffusion of Thracian culture in antiquity to the rise of antisemitism in interwar Romania. Post-revolution Romania From 1996 to 2004, Florescu served as Honorary Consul for New England by the Romanian Foreign Ministry, the first person to hold such a position in the United States. His first job as honorary consul was to oversee voting by Boston-area Romanian citizens in one of the first democratic Romanian elections since the Revolution of 1989. After the Revolution of 1989, he also organized visits of Romanian presidents, and members of the Romanian Royal House to Harvard University, The John F. Kennedy library and Boston City Hall. He was Emeritus Honorary Consul. In his retirement from France and Poiana Brașov, Florescu repurposed the East European Research Centre to create an annual scholarship for several gifted Romanian teenagers to study in the Boston area during summer months. These scholarships still continue to this day. His son, John M. Florescu, serves on the board of Educational Enrichment for Romanian Children. Florescu died on May 18, 2014 in Mougins, France from complications of pneumonia. Upon his death, the Romanian royal family released a statement of condolences and recognition for Florescu's work. Dracula research In his bestseller In Search of Dracula (1972), co-authored with Raymond T. McNally, he claimed that the brutal Vlad III, voivod of the principality of Wallachia, was the inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula. Vlad was a member of the House of Drăculești, and Stoker's novel took place in real locations such as Transylvania and Tihuța Pass, including even correct rail lines. For this reason, Florescu concluded that the main character must also be inspired by facts. Vlad Țepeș, known for the slaughter of many Saxons and Ottomans, with a penchant for impaling his enemies on stakes, was the logical choice as the model for Dracula. The book was translated into 15 languages and boosted the Romanian tourism industry as young Westerners flocked to Romania to trace the footsteps of the historical Dracula. Other research Florescu also wrote about literary creations like Frankenstein with In Search of Frankenstein (1975) and the Pied Piper of Hamelin with In Search of the Pied Piper (2005). In the former, Florescu advocated the theory that the German theologian, alchemist, anatomist, and physician Johann Konrad Dippel was the