KHR President

Current KHR President Dr. Tara M. Tuttle is the Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion in the Lewis Honors College with a secondary appointment as Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is also affiliate faculty of UK’s Center for Equality and Social Justice. Formerly, she directed the Honors Program at Saint Catharine College. Her research examines the advancement of DEI initiatives through honors education and the intersections of religious belief and female sexuality in contemporary U.S. culture. Her work appears in the forthcoming volumes The New Honors: Advanced Learning for Today and Tomorrow and A Comprehensive Guide to Honors Colleges, as well as The Journal of  Religion and Popular Culture, Studies in Popular Culture, and The Journal of Catholic Higher Education.

The KHR Treasurer is Dr. David Coleman, Executive Director of Honors at Eastern Kentucky University. His research interests include the social, cultural and religious history of early modern Spain. He has served as Treasurer of the Southern Regional Honors Council and has also served on the NCHC’s Awards and Grants Committee as well as the Finance Committee. He is an approved NCHC External Reviewer, and has published articles in the Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council as well as the NCHC monograph series. He has served as a group leader in the “Beginning in Honors” track at the annual NCHC conference. 

Past KHR President Dr. Jon Blandford is the Director of the Honors Program and an Associate Professor of English at Bellarmine University. He is also the Executive Secretary of the Southern Regional Honors Council. His research interests include U.S. crime literature, law and literature, and the literatures of slavery and abolition. He is the author of book chapters on the memoirs of eighteenth-century con man Stephen Burroughs, spectacle in nineteenth-century American law and culture, and late-nineteenth century women’s detective fiction, and of a forthcoming book chapter on pandemic responses of honors communities and hosting honors conferences in virtual formats.

Dr. Blandford fearlessly guided KHR through its first ever virtual conference in 2020 and continues to build the Kentucky honors community by fostering connection and collaboration across the commonwealth's many honors programs and colleges.