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News Release

Last modified: Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Distinguished professor emeritus elected into the European Academy of Sciences and Arts

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 6. 2009

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Peter Bondanella, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of comparative literature, film studies and Italian at Indiana University, has been elected to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Based in Salzburg, Austria, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts is an interdisciplinary network of scholars from various fields who focus on scientific, social, cultural and ethical issues concerning the region. Bondanella is the first IU scholar inducted into the academy.

The academy was created in 1990, following the end of the Cold War and in response to a perceived need for wider dialogue. Today, it has more than 1,200 members, who include more than 25 Nobel Prize winners, John Brademas (a former Indiana congressman and former president of New York University) and Pope Benedict XVI.

The academy's seven branches are devoted to medicine, the humanities, the arts, natural sciences, the environment, economics/social sciences/law and world religions.

Bondanella, who retired in 2007 after 35 years of service to IU, now resides in St. George, Utah, and is the first IU faculty member elected to the academy. He was inducted at a ceremony in Salzburg, Austria, in March.

While serving on the IU faculty, Bondanella distinguished himself in the field of Italian studies, particularly in the area of Renaissance thought. He has written about Renaissance thinkers, Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini, and contributed to our understanding of Italian literature from the Renaissance to the modern era.

He collaborated on translations of literary classics such as Boccaccio's Decameron, Carlo Ridolfi's The Life of Titian, Machiavelli's Prince and a collection of other Machiavelli texts. He also edited The Dictionary of Italian Literature, the first single-volume reference to Italian literature in English, and wrote the 1987 Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, The Eternal City: Images of Rome in the Modern World.

In addition, Bondanella was one of the first American scholars to embrace Italian cinema in the early 1970s and spent nearly a decade producing the influential text Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. He later went on to write the first book about Italian Americans in Hollywood films.

Since his retirement, Bondanella received a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship for work on the dream notebooks of Italian director Federico Fellini in Rome and Rimini. He has two books coming out this year: a collection of essays on Italy's most published novelist, Umberto Eco (Cambridge University Press), and a new comprehensive history of a century of Italian film (Continuum International Publishers).

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