As Dean of Students at New College in Sarasota, Florida, for five years, Wendy Bashant oversees several departments, including Residential Life, Food Service, Career Services, Overseas Programs, Student Activities, Community Engagement, Counseling and Wellness, Diversity and Gender, Achievement and Retention, Student Government, The Student Center, and the Fitness Center. Reporting directly to the president of the college, Wendy Bashant engages students and staff to uphold the mission of the college. The focus of her division is to build links between the students’ academic lives that connect to the world outside of the university.

At New College, Wendy Bashant teaches in the English Department and assists student government. Also managing several departments and various student activities and service-learning projects in the Sarasota community, Wendy Bashant brought a Vista grant to campus in 2006, expanding the service learning options for students. Students spend mid-semester breaks, serving migrant farm workers in Florida, teaching literacy in the Appalachian Mountains, and helping prevent home foreclosures in the Miami area.

When USF separated from New College, Wendy Bashant established the New College Student Affairs Division and the retention rate increased substantially, growing from 77 percent to over 85 percent in fewer than three years. She was instrumental in bringing a Black Box Theatre to the student center to further connect the students’ academic lives with their lives outside of the classroom. Recent classes that she’s taught include: Victorian Poetry, Politics and Poetics of the Irish Renaissance, and Modern British Theatre. Her classes are oversubscribed, and students comment on the passion and enthusiasm that she puts into her classes, and her accessibility as a college administrator and teacher.

After obtaining her BA in English Literature from Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont, Wendy Bashant continued her education at the University of Rochester, where she received her Ph.D. in English Literature. Her dissertation, “The Double Blossom and a Sterile Kiss” explored the image of the hermaphrodite in nineteenth-century British literary tradition. It focused on the image of the Romantic, utopian androgyne, investigating when that image began to decay, turn pornographic, rendering the late-century hermaphrodite. Wendy Bashant was awarded the Susan B. Anthony Dissertation Grant (Fall 1989-Spring 1990) from the University of Rochester for her work on this topic. As a tenured Professor and Chair of the English Department at Coe College, she won the Iowa teaching award for promoting gender equity in the classroom from the Iowa chapter of the AAUW.