Former Honors College dean accepts position in Washington, DC

When Julia Bondanella was asked to apply for the position of assistant chairman for programs at the National Endowment of Humanities in Washington, D.C., she had a lot to think about. \nAfter serving as associate dean of the IU Honors College for 25 years, the idea of leaving the University was more than a little troubling. She'd be leaving the College of Arts and Sciences, where she served as a professor of French and Italian, and she'd leave her husband, Peter Bondanella, also a professor.\nBut after former colleague Bruce Cole, distinguished IU professor and newly appointed NEH Chairman, encouraged her to apply for the position, she sent in an application to a personnel office at the White House. After a fall 2001 phone interview, Bondanella was hired. \nBondanella completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Montana and received her Master's degree in French at the University of Kansas. She earned her doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Oregon and began teaching at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1974, she took the job in the IU Honors College. \n"She is a remarkable and admirable woman who had high standards for her students," said Charlene Brown, associate director of the Wells Scholars Program. "She loved working with students, and she thought they deserved to have high standards. She worked hard to make sure they would get a good education and believed IU was a place students could get that…she wanted to do her part."\nBondanella has held positions in several national academic organizations, including secretary of the American Association for Italian Studies and president of the National Collegiate Honors Council.\n"I ran a scholarship program for many years, and I have spent most of my life and my career promoting humanities as an integral part of any education," Bondanella said. \n "Humanities can teach us to be more thoughtful and reflective about ourselves, our world, our values, but they can also inspire us to be more creative and imaginative."\nNEH is a federal grant-making agency that focuses on research, education and public programs in the humanities. Bondanella's primary duties there lie in overseeing the five divisions making the grants NEH distributes. The divisions are education, research, preservation and access, public programs and challenge grants.\nBondanella said her experiences at IU relate significantly to her new position.\n"Teaching literature, doing scholarly research on literature, and learning more about literature…this job is about knowing the field, having a good sense of what the current trends and debates are and sort of being immersed at this slightly different level," Bondanella said. \nAnother aspect of her job involves making recommendations to the NEH chairman about ideas and special projects. \n"I think this is a wonderful and exciting opportunity to promote humanities at the national level," Bondanella said. "It's a very unique institution in America, with an extraordinarily positive effect in trying to extend humanities throughout the country."\nBondanella said NEH is enormously concerned with educating people of all levels. The organization provides yearly summer internships for college students with an interest in the humanities. The paid internship in Washington, D.C. provides ten weeks of experience in a NEH office. \n"There is a great sense of history here, and so besides working in NEH and learning how the agency runs and how devoted all the people in the agency are to promoting the humanities, you get the rest of Washington, as well," Bondanella said.