About the Faculty

Karen Polinger Foster
Art of the Ancient Near East and Aegean
karen.foster@yale.edu

Karen Polinger Foster (A.B. 1971, Mount Holyoke College; M.A. 1974, M.Phil. 1974, Ph.D. 1976, Yale University) specializes in the art and archaeology of the Bronze Age Aegean, with particular interests in interconnections with Egypt and Mesopotamia.  She is the author of Aegean Faience of the Bronze Age (1979) and Minoan Ceramic Relief (1981).  She co-edited with Robert Laffineur METRON: Measuring the Aegean Bronze Age (2004), the proceedings of the 9th International Aegean Conference, held at Yale University in 2002.  Her most recent book, Civilizations of Ancient Iraq (2009), co-authored with Benjamin R. Foster, is a substantial revision of Iraq Beyond the Headlines: History, Archaeology, and War (2005), co-authored with Benjamin R. Foster and Patty Gerstenblith.   Her current major research project involves the final preparation of Strange and Wonderful: Exotic Flora and Fauna in Image and Imagination, a comprehensive study of this material from ancient to modern times.

In addition, she is the author of over seventy articles and book reviews.  Her articles treat various aspects of Bronze Age art and iconography, including studies of the wall painting programs from Thera.  She has recently completed a trilogy dealing with volcanic imagery in art and literature, beginning with the Thera eruption and concluding with the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii.  Her interest in the chronology of the Thera eruption has resulted in the publication of several collaborative scientific analyses of pumice from Egyptian graves.  She participates regularly in conferences, symposia, panel discussions, and lecture series for scholarly and more general audiences, and has organized or co-organized over a dozen special events, exhibitions, and conferences.

In something of a departure from her scholarly career, she retold for children a Sumerian folktale and illustrated it with her own cut-paper mosaics based on Sumerian art.  The book, The City of Rainbows: A Tale from Ancient Sumer (1999), is often used in schools here and abroad. 

She has also been actively involved with local history research in the area of Soissons, France.  In 2005, she published Tartiers: Portrait d’un village soissonnais.  Presently, she is finishing Au secours des enfants soissonnais, an edition and translation into French (co-authored with Monique Judas-Urschel) of the previously unpublished letters of Mary Breckinridge, written during her service in war-torn France from 1919 to 1921.  

CURRICULUM VITAE