Karen Stern awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship

CONGRATULATIONS! PROFESSOR KAREN B. STERN NAMED 2026 GUGGENHEIM FELLOW. Karen B. Stern, who studies ancient Jewish life through archaeology, material culture, and the senses, has been named a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow (CUNY Graduate Center).

Her work explores Jewish communities in the Greek, Roman, and Sassanian worlds, drawing on archaeology, inscriptions, and sensory history to understand lived religious experience. She is the author of Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity, which won a 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, as well as Inscribing Devotion and Death. Her research has been supported by organizations including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Getty Villa, and she has received multiple teaching awards from Brooklyn College.

The fellowship will support Stern’s new project, “Sanctity: An Archaeology of the Senses in the Ancient Synagogue,” which reexamines ancient synagogues through fieldwork, artifacts, and sensory analysis. It will enable travel to sites and collections across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe.

Professor Stern is interviewed in this press release.

For PaleoJudaica posts on her work, see here and links.

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