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Home: Our Faculty: Brooklyn College Faculty:

Karen B. Stern

Assistant Professor   Department: History   Location: 507s Whitehead Hall   Phone: 718-951-5000 x1168   Fax: 718-951-4504   Email:

Karen Stern is assistant professor of Jewish History at Brooklyn College. She has taught in departments of Religion at Dartmouth College, University of Southern California, American Jewish University, and Brown University and has served as a visiting scholar at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University and the Getty Villa Research Institute in Los Angeles. Dr. Stern has conducted field research in Tunisia, Morocco, and Israel, and has excavated in Petra in Jordan, Sepphoris in Israel, and at the Palace of Nestor and the Athenian Agora in Greece. She has been invited to give lectures at Tel Aviv University, the Getty Villa Research Institute, The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, and the Brooklyn Museum. Her recent articles address the interpretations of iconography in Jewish and Christian funerary and devotional art. Education: Doctor of Philosophy, Brown University - 2006 (Religious Studies) A.M., Brown University - 2002 (Religious Studies, Program for Judaism in Antiquity) A.B., Dartmouth College - 1997 (Classics) Areas of Expertise: Cultural identity and material culture of Jewish populations throughout the Greco-Roman Mediterranean; ancient history of North Africa and the Levant; diversity of Jewish rabbinic and non-rabbinic populations in late antiquity; religions of the Greco-Roman world and late antiquity; biblical texts of the Second Temple period Books and Publications "Mapping Devotion in Roman Dura Europos: Reconsideration of the Synagogue Ceiling," American Journal of Archaelogy 114 (forthcoming) (Books and Publications: Peer Reviewed Article) 2010 Keeping the Dead in their Place: Jewish Commemoration and Cultural Identity in Roman North Africa, Erich Gruen, ed., Cultural Identity and the Peoples of the Ancient Mediterranean. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Museum Publications. (Books and Publications: Forthcoming Publications) 2010 Limitations of Jewish as a Label in Roman North Africa, Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Worlds 39 (2008):1-34. (Books and Publications: Peer Reviewed Article) 2008 Inscribing Devotion and Death: Archaeological Evidence for Jewish Populations of North Africa (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World, 161). Leiden: Brill, 2008. (Books and Publications: Book) 2008 Awards, Honors and Fellowships National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship, W.F. Albright Institute of Archaelogical Research, Jerusalem, Israel (Grants and Fellowships) 2010