Naomi Yavneh Klos, Ph.D. is President of the National Collegiate Honors Council.  Her research focuses on the role honors education can play in educating students regarding justice, and how honors itself can serve as a locus of access, equity and inclusive excellence in higher education.  The former Director of the University Honors Program at Loyola University New Orleans, where she created a curriculum emphasizing social justice and diversity learning outcomes, and a leader in honors education nationally and internationally, during this sabbatical year she is consulting with Eastern Washington University as Special Assistant to the Provost for Honors.

The founding chair of the Council of Undergraduate Research’s Arts and Humanities division, the founding director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and former Associate Dean of the Honors College at the University of South Florida, Dr. Yavneh Klos is committed to high impact practices that contribute to retention and graduation, and is an innovator in interdisciplinary and community-engaged curricular development.  In addition to publications regarding honors, undergraduate research, and the pedagogy of justice (including, most recently, the lead essay for the 2018 JNCHC forum on “Honors and Social Justice,”) she is a frequent presenter at conferences such as AACU, the European Honors Conference and the quadrennial Jesuit Justice Conference, on whose steering committee she serves.

An alumna of Hunter Elementary and High School in New York City, she completed her undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature cum laude at Princeton University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and subsequently completed masters and doctoral degrees in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.  In addition to her research in honors and social justice pedagogy, she has published and presented extensively on issues of gender and spirituality in early modern Italy.  For the past two summers, she has collaborated with Hanze University for Applied Sciences and Westerbork Transit Camp, both in the Netherlands, on an honors summer institute on holocaust memory.