Naomi Yavneh-Klos

Naomi Yavneh Klos, Ph.D. is the Reverend Emmett M. Bienvenu, SJ, Distinguished Chair in Humanities, and Professor and Co-Chair of Languages and Cultures at Loyola University New Orleans. From 2011 until 2018, Dr. Yavneh Klos was the Director of Loyola’s University Honors Program, where she led the creation of a curriculum emphasizing social justice and diversity learning outcomes. A leader in honors education nationally and internationally, she is a former member of the executive board and past president of the National Collegiate Honors Council and chair of the AJCU honors consortium.  Since 2017, Dr. Yavneh Klos has collaborated with Windesheim Honours College, Hanze University of Applied Sciences, and Memorial Camp Westerbork, all in the Netherlands, on an annual, multi-week instituted focused on Holocaust memory.  In 2020, Dr. Yavneh Klos was a Fulbright Scholar at Windesheim, where she taught “Diversity, Social Justice, and Inclusion” and conducted research for her current book project.  “In Quarantine with Anne Frank: Lessons of Empathy and Compassion in a Time of Anxiety, Intolerance and Hate” explores how understanding the nuances of Anne’s story in the larger context of the Holocaust can guide us in addressing contemporary challenges of prejudice and systemic racism.

Dr. Yavneh Klos received her A.B. from Princeton University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, all in Comparative Literature with an emphasis in Italian Renaissance Studies. The author of numerous articles on gender and spirituality in the representation of both the virginal and the maternal body in Renaissance Italy, as well as three award-winning essay collections on gender in the early modern world, she is a former president and board member of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women.

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 is committed to high impact practices that contribute to retention, graduation, and community, and is an innovator in interdisciplinary and community-engaged research, and the pedagogy of justice. She is a member of the steering committee of the AJCU “Commitment to Justice in Jesuit Higher Education” conference. In December, 2018, she traveled to Israel as a Fellow under the auspices of Media Watch International and the Jewish National Fund, where she was able to develop collaborations with educators at the University of Haifa and Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.