Dr. Karen Polinger Foster

Karen Polinger Foster is a specialist in the art and archaeology of the Bronze Age Aegean, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. She spent her career teaching in the Departments of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and History of Art at Yale University. She is the author of more than a dozen books and numerous articles, with a particular focus on cultural interconnections across the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Her first-hand experience of the Arab and Islamic world comes from archaeological fieldwork in Egypt and Syria, and from extensive travel from Iran and Central Asia to Mauritania, and from Turkey to Ethiopia. Polinger Foster holds an AB in Ancient Civilizations from Mount Holyoke College and a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Yale University. She is bilingual in French and speaks excavation Arabic.