ABOUT US

Naomi Yavneh Klos, Ph.D., serves as Dean of the Honors College at the University of New Mexico, a position she assumed on July 1, 2025, following her distinguished tenure as the Reverend Emmett M. Bienvenu, S.J., Distinguished Chair in Humanities and Professor of Languages and Cultures at Loyola University New Orleans. A nationally recognized leader in honors education, Dr. Yavneh Klos is known for her innovation in interdisciplinary, justice-oriented, and community-engaged learning.

From 2011 to 2018, she directed Loyola University’s Honors Program, where she developed a curriculum emphasizing social justice, diversity, and experiential learning. A past President of the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC), she led national initiatives promoting access, equity, and inclusive excellence in higher education. Her leadership and scholarship earned her a Fulbright Fellowship in the Netherlands, where she taught at Windesheim Honours College and collaborated with the Anne Frank House.

Dr. Yavneh Klos previously served as the founding director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and Associate Dean of the Honors College at the University of South Florida, one of the nation’s leading public research universities. She also founded the Council of Undergraduate Research’s Arts and Humanities Division and was elected Chair of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities Honors Consortium and its representative to the AJCU Council of Chairs.

She holds an A.B. from Princeton University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, where she specialized in Renaissance studies, gender, and spirituality. A prolific scholar, she has co-edited three award-winning essay collections on early modern gender studies and is completing her forthcoming book, Anne Frank Anew, which examines how exploring Anne Frank’s story through new interpretive lenses deepens understanding of the Holocaust and contemporary antisemitism.

At Loyola, Dr. Yavneh Klos founded and continues to lead the Loyola Anne Frank Project, partnering with the Anne Frank House and the Anne Frank Center at the University of South Carolina. Through her seminar Lessons from Anne Frank’s Diary, she mentors university students who train New Orleans middle schoolers to serve as docents for the traveling exhibition Anne Frank: A History for Today, using Anne’s story to promote dialogue about prejudice, intolerance, and resilience.

Dr. Yavneh Klos has collaborated with institutions including Yad Vashem, the National WWII Museum, the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience. Exhibits developed in collaboration with her students have appeared at the Louisiana State Capitol (Bicentennial Exhibit), the New Orleans Jazz Museum (50th Anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination), and the 2016 Democratic National Convention (“U.S. Hospitality and the American First Lady”). Her most recent research initiative, “Yarns of Resilience: Knitting Women’s Narratives in the Holocaust,” explores the human stories behind handmade textiles of the Holocaust era, illuminating women’s creativity and endurance under persecution.

A passionate advocate for student-centered, transformative education, Dr. Yavneh Klos believes that honors programs in public universities have the power to shape engaged global citizens and to model inclusion, creativity, and critical inquiry. In her new role at UNM, one of the nation’s leading Hispanic-Serving Research Institutions, she continues to expand opportunities for interdisciplinary scholarship, access, and community impact across New Mexico and beyond.

In her personal life, Naomi enjoys knitting and family life with her husband, Stanley Yavneh Klos, a historic preservationist and collector of early American documents and architecture. Together, they curate and exhibit artifacts dating from the 1600s to the Founding Era, contributing to public education through their organization Historic.us. A native of New York, Dr. Yavneh Klos is delighted to call New Mexico home and to embrace its vibrant culture and cuisine.

Stanley Yavneh Klos is an accomplished author, entrepreneur, retired professor, and former professional basketball player in the Italian Basketball Association. His multifaceted career spans sports, academia, business, and historical preservation, fields in which he has consistently demonstrated vision, leadership, and innovation.

Stan currently serves as President of Historic.us Corporation, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting public engagement with American history through the exhibition of primary-source documents. Since 1999, Historic.us has curated major exhibits at universities, national historic sites, libraries, and museums across the United States. In addition to curating historical materials, he has authored five books on U.S. history, focusing on the nation’s founding era and the importance of documentary evidence. His most recent work, The Congressional Evolution of the United States of America, traces the nation’s legislative and institutional development through the actions of the Continental and Confederation Congresses.

As a public speaker, Stan has keynoted numerous historical and civic events, including the re-entombment of President Samuel Huntington and First Lady Martha Huntington. His scholarship and commentary have appeared in hundreds of print and digital media outlets, among them History Channel’s Decoded: The Declaration of Independence, U.S. News & World Report’s 2006 cover story “Washington? Get In Line,” and the Discovery Channel’s Unsolved History: Plots to Kill Lincoln.

A dedicated historic preservationist, Stan has redeveloped 32 landmark properties across five states, including Vaudeville theaters, Gold Rush mansions, and 19th-century churches, reviving their economic and cultural viability. He has co-founded several preservation initiatives, including the James Monroe Birthplace Commission, to safeguard the nation’s architectural and documentary heritage.

As a real estate entrepreneur, Stan acquired RE/MAX of Pennsylvania/Northwest and implemented a marketing strategy that expanded annual commission revenues from $240,000 to $36 million. He later transitioned his expertise into academia, serving as Assistant Director of the Loyola University Honors Program and teaching university courses in American Studies, Communications, and in the business school, the MBA-level Real Estate Investment and Business Strategy course.

In 1999, he founded an early online education publishing company that acquired over 8,500 URLs, creating a vast digital library of student-authored papers under the Virtualology banner. By 2002, the project drew more than 500,000 page views per day, pioneering open-access academic publishing before the rise of Wikipedia. When the educational web landscape changed, many of Stan’s historic domain names, such as JohnHancock.org, SojournerTruth.com, and ArticlesOfConfederation.com, became permanent educational resources, while hundreds of others, including AnneFrank.org, were donated to non-profit organizations worldwide.

In November 2001, Stan donated AnneFrank.org to the Anne Frank House. By 2015, the site had been visited over 8.6 million times annually by more than 6.7 million unique users, generating 57 million page views, with visitors from the United States, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, Italy, France, Brazil, Canada, and Spain.

Stan is also the co-founder of Dinosaur Safaris, Inc. (DSI), a private paleontology firm based in Shell, Wyoming. The company’s excavations yielded five fully articulated dinosaurs, including Sophie the Stegosaurus, the world’s most complete specimen at that time, now on permanent display at the Natural History Museum in London, and a Camarasaurus exhibited at the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum in Japan.

Before his entrepreneurial and academic endeavors, Stan distinguished himself as a collegiate and professional athlete. A former NCAA Division I basketball player, he helped lead Idaho State University to the Elite Eight, later continuing his career in Italy’s professional league with Amaro Harry’s of Bologna. In 1978, he captained the U.S. team at the International Invitational Basketball Tournament in Bologna, Italy.

Stan’s service extends to multiple boards and advisory councils, including the West Virginia Independent Colleges & Universities, the James Monroe Memorial Foundation Advisory Board, the Pittsburgh YMCA Family Camp, the Mercy Center of New Jersey, and the Alumni Board of Directors at Idaho State University.

During the 1990s, Stan was active in West Virginia politics, serving as Finance Chairman of the West Virginia Republican State Committee and as the 1994 Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, opposing longtime incumbent Robert C. Byrd. Later, as the Republican candidate for State Treasurer, he led efforts to restore the management of the state’s pension assets to the elected Treasurer’s Office, and in 1997, championed a successful statewide referendum amending the West Virginia Constitution to permit the investment of public funds in equities.

Stan earned a B.A. in American Studies and a B.S. in Zoology, followed by an M.A. in Rhetorical Theory & Historic Public Address, and completed advanced doctoral studies (“ABD”) in Mass Communications and Marketing. He attended St. Peter’s College, Idaho State University, and The Pennsylvania State University.