Karen B. Stern

Karen B. Stern is Professor of History at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Her research is deeply interdisciplinary. She studied Classics with honors at Dartmouth College, earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Brown University, and has excavated and conducted field research in different areas of the Mediterranean, including Jordan, Greece, Tunisia, Morocco, and Israel. 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 Jews and Christians in antiquity, who inhabited areas around the Mediterranean through Arabia and Mesopotamia. She is author of Inscribing Devotion and Death: Archaeological Evidence for Jewish Populations of North Africa (Brill 2007); and 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). She will serve as a visiting fellow at Bard Graduate Center in Spring 2023 to advance her current book project, which considers the lived history of Judaism through the senses; she is also preparing a museum exhibition on holy graffiti.