What were the major achievements of the last dean’s term, and what can be expected in the next? In this interview, Judit Bóna, Vice-Dean for Research and Academic Affairs at the ELTE Faculty of Humanities, reflects on the renewal of the Faculty’s academic life, the strengthening of innovation, and the strategic goals shaping the future visibility of the humanities.
Madam Vice-Dean, the previous dean’s term marked your first period as Vice-Dean. How would you evaluate the past five years, and which achievements are you most proud of?
A great deal has happened over the past five years, even though the faculty leadership had to work under particularly challenging circumstances. We began our work during the COVID pandemic, followed by building closures, so understandably not all of the plans we had set for ourselves could be fully realized. Nevertheless, by continuously developing and rethinking the faculty’s scientific grant scheme, we sought to support our colleagues in achieving their research goals. In terms of research, I consider the development of faculty journals to be one of our most important achievements.
At the initiative of my colleague Marianna Slíz, editor of Névtani Értesítő, shortly after my appointment as Vice-Dean we devised a system that enables our journals to be indexed in international databases. This system is now running smoothly and efficiently under the management of Edit Zelei and her team. We also began to provide financial support for the journals, and an increasing number of faculty journals have been included in Scopus and other international databases.
We carried out developments in both research and teaching infrastructure, in which the Department of Doctoral and Academic Affairs, with whom I work very closely, played a key role. From the very beginning, one of our stated goals was to ensure that, alongside the many available teaching-related training opportunities, our faculty members could also participate in courses specifically related to research and academic life. Within this framework, we organized training sessions, for example, in English academic writing and in developing presentation skills.
I also consider it a significant step forward that we began promoting an innovation culture at the faculty.
On my initiative, we established the Faculty Innovation Award for lecturers, and, in 2022, we launched the Humanities Ideas Competition. By now, the Faculty of Primary and Pre-School Education and the Faculty of Social Sciences have also joined as co-organizers. We maintain an excellent relationship with the ELTE Innovation Center, and several faculty research projects have been included in the TINLAB initiatives, which are now also featured on international innovation platforms. In short, colleagues in the humanities are achieving major successes in the field of innovation as well, and I am particularly proud of this because during this cycle we began to foster the idea that scholars in the humanities do indeed have a role to play in innovation.
During these five years, we introduced a number of events and series of events with a view to establishing enduring traditions. Among them, the Humanities and Artificial Intelligence conference has already been organized on three occasions. We also gave a great deal of thought to how we could appropriately welcome our newly appointed professors, and I believe we succeeded in developing a good format for this. Last year, the inaugural lectures and welcome ceremonies were intergarted into the opening event of the Month of Science, and we intend to continue this practice in the future.
The Faculty Publication Excellence Award was originally established by Dean Gábor Sonkoly. In the second year, we concluded that we did not only want to reward these publications, but also to publicize them more widely. As a result, the “About Our Research” section was created on the faculty website, where colleagues are now required to upload their academic articles. I consider it extremely important that we present our research results in a form that is accessible and understandable to a broader audience.
I would like to emphasize that all of this could only be achieved with the support of the faculty leadership and through the work of an outstanding team, the staff of the Department of Doctoral and Academic Affairs.
What will be the main challenges and objectives in the field of research and academic administration in the coming period?
I would formulate our goals by building on the past five years, naturally in alignment with the programs of Dean Dávid Bartus and Rector Lénárd Darázs, particularly with regard to the flagship projects. I believe that in the coming period our most important task will be to improve the social perception of the humanities, and to this end we need to develop an even more conscious and effective science communication strategy. We must step outside the walls and familiar frameworks of the university so that we can present our results not only through our own channels—this is, of course, also a matter of resources and energy.
Another important objective is to further increase innovation activity and make visible the fact that the humanities also have socially viable applications and can be integrated in tangible ways into healthcare, business, or cultural projects.
At the same time, it is unfortunately evident that fewer and fewer resources are available for the humanities, so we must work on attracting more external funding. This includes strengthening international grant activity, as well as identifying and engaging external sponsors and supporters. Revitalizing alumni life is also among our goals. Although many things are already functioning well in this area, we would like to broaden the opportunities further, which requires close cooperation and joint thinking with ELTE’s central alumni organization.
In the Dean’s program, increasing the international visibility of academic excellence plays a key role. To achieve this, we must draw colleagues’ attention to existing opportunities and continue to support doctoral education. The overseeing body of the university has set the renewal of doctoral programs as a goal, which was reinforced by a new regulation issued in the summer of 2025, and our task is to integrate these changes into our own practices.
Perhaps a research career is less attractive today than it was in my youth, primarily for financial reasons. If a student has to work full-time alongside their studies, it is obvious that they cannot study and conduct research with the same level of focus as before, when university was our primary occupation. Addressing this situation is another challenge ahead of us.
Another recurring issue is tailoring scientometric evaluation to the humanities, a topic that is subject to continuous and joint discussion within both the faculty and the university leadership.
It is also important to mention the humanities research centers that were integrated into ELTE last summer. It would be worthwhile to strengthen cooperation with them as much as possible. In my own field, linguistics, we have had—and continue to have—many joint projects with them. I myself have worked on grant applications at the Research Centre for Linguistics, and several members of the Research Centre teach in our doctoral programs as well. This is a well-functioning, fruitful collaboration with significant long-term potential.
In addition to your work as Vice-Dean, you are the Director of the Institute of Hungarian Linguistics and Finno-Ugric Studies, and you remain actively engaged as a linguist. In 2025, your work was recognized with the Hungarian Language Guardian Award. What research are you currently involved in?
Unfortunately, I have less time for research and for my students than I would like, as the role of Vice-Dean in itself is a full-time position. Nevertheless, I do not wish to lose touch with my profession. Over the past five years, I obtained the Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences degree and was appointed full professor, both of which I am very pleased about. The building closures also played a role in this, as working from home during that period allowed for more time to be devoted to research.
As a linguist, I am currently involved in a conversation analysis research project and also conduct studies in the field of clinical linguistics.
Together with my colleagues, we are continuing projects launched in previous years: we study speech characteristics in neurological disorders, investigate speech fluency disorders, and analyze conversational skills in children’s language development from phonetic and pragmatic perspectives. All of these research projects have international relevance and can therefore be presented to broader audiences, both nationally and internationally.
What do you find time for in your free time, and what are the things you haven’t been able to do in recent years but hope to pursue in the near future?
I do not think I will have more free time in the coming years than I have had recently. However, I love traveling, and my husband feels the same way, so we spend most of our free time traveling. Fortunately, my work also allows me to travel a great deal, for example to conferences, and we have also taken part in several Erasmus trips with colleagues and doctoral students.
One of my greatest wishes is to sail around the world someday—the plan already exists, now only time is missing. What I do regret, however, is that I have very little time to spend with my friends, so I would like to devote more time to them in the future. In addition, since research is also a hobby for me, I would like to spend a bit more time on it than I have been able to in the past five years.
