Manja Klemenčič researches, teaches, advises and acts as a consultant in the area of sociology and politics of higher education and international and comparative higher education. Her major research contribution is in the study of student governments and student representation in higher education which is part of her broader research agenda on student agency and the impact of students on higher education. Her research seeks to correct the one-directional study of college impact on students.
She is Lecturer on Sociology offering higher education courses at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University and Lecturer in General Education at Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Klemenčič is also local affiliate at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. In Slovenia, she is an associate researcher at the Centre for Educational Policy Studies, Faculty of Education at University of Ljubljana and collaborates with the research group at CMEPIUS, Centre of the Republic of Slovenia for Mobility and European Educational and Training Programmes, in particular as a member of the global academic network APIKS - Academic Profession in Knowledge Societies.
Klemenčič has over 100 publications and over 60 keynotes and invited lectures on a broad array of topics, including student-centered learning and teaching, quality assurance and institutional research, civic role of higher education, academic profession, internationalization of higher education, and different aspects of higher education policies and reforms in Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, the Western Balkans and in Slovenia. Among her latest publications are the The Routledge Handbook of Student Centered Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (Routledge, 2020, co-edited with Sabine Hoidn), in which she also contributed chapters on student agency and actorhood in student centered learning and teaching and on designing and evaluating the student centered ecosystems in higher education. As thematic editors of section on Elite and Mass Higher Education, she co-edited The International Encyclopedia of Higher Education Systems and Institutions (Springer Nature, 2020), in which she also contributed entries on student politics, student governments, student campus employees, alternative higher education and the effects of the higher education expansion on students.
Her three staple courses offered at Harvard have repeatedly won Harvard’s awards for teaching excellence. Twice, she was voted by the Harvard Yearbook Publications one of the favorite professors by the graduating class (’19 and ’20), and, in 2020, she won John R. Marquand Award for Excellence in Advising and Support to Students.
Since 2014, Klemenčič serves as Editor-in-Chief of European Journal of Higher Education published by Routledge/Taylor&Francis, and since 2015 as Co-Editor of the academic book series Understanding Student Experiences of Higher Education published by Bloomsbury. Klemenčič regularly acts as a consultant for international organizations and governments on higher education policies and instruments.
Native of Slovenia, Klemenčič resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband Khaled El Rouayheb and two children.
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