Brooklyn College professor Karen Stern Gabbay, Brown PhD 2006, has been announced as a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow for her work in the Classics. She will receive a monetary stipend to pursue her project, “Sanctity: An Archaeology of the Senses in the Ancient Synagogue.”

Project description: 
Dominant approaches to Jewish prayer describe liturgical texts and scripture as the centerpieces of Jewish worship inside of ancient synagogues. “Sanctity: An Archaeology of the Senses in the Ancient Synagogue” demonstrates an alternative to these misleading assumptions. Its unprecedented examination of archaeological

 findings reveals how fundamentally embodied were Jewish experiences inside synagogues, entailing non-liturgical activities of implanting, concealing, illuminating, scenting, tasting, viewing, touching, and imagining. Methods of experimental archaeology, sensory mapping, and histories of experience reveal how these features of synagogue life were strategic and precatory and formed shared devotional landscapes, in which powerful multisensory experiences shaped institutional memories and promoted feelings of common origins and purpose. This approach radically recasts premodern synagogues as vital spaces that engaged visitors’ hands, feet, ears, noses, eyes, and tongues, where vibrant objects and human organs mediated affects and activities of devotion. Histories of synagogues and their visitors are now ripe for revision.

In addition to her PhD in Religious Studies, Stern holds an Artium Magister from Brown University in Religious Studies, Program for Judaism in Antiquity, 2002.

More information about Karen Stern can be found on the Brooklyn College website.

Information about the 2026 Guggenheim Fellows can be found on the Guggenheim Fellowship website.