Karen B. Stern is a professor of history at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She earned her BA with honors in classics at Dartmouth College and her MA and PhD in religious studies from Brown University. Several grants, fellowships, and residencies from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and the Getty Villa have supported her research, which deploys methods from fields of archaeology, anthropology, epigraphy, history, and religion to investigate the daily lives and material culture of ancient Jews from different areas of the Mediterranean, Arabia, and Mesopotamia. She is the author of Inscribing Devotion and Death: Archaeological Evidence for Jewish Populations of North Africa (Brill, 2007); Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity (2018; paperback ed. 2020), winner of a 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award through the Association for Jewish Studies (category: Jews and the Arts); and co-editor of With the Loyal You Show Yourself Loyal: Essays on Relationships in the Hebrew Bible in Honor of Saul M. Olyan (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2021). Her current book project considers the lived history of Judaism through the senses.
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Karen B. Stern
Visiting Fellow, Spring 2023
Visiting Faculty and Fellows