Karen S. Rubinson is an art historian and archaeologist specializing in the steppe and Central Asia in the first millennium BCE and early first millennium CE and the South Caucasus in the Bronze Age and Early Iron Ages. One focus of her work is how objects of artistic production, both aesthetically and technologically, can help understand cultural contact and exchange; another is gender questions in the Eurasian Iron Age. Dr. Rubinson has organized international workshops to bring scholars together to share data on topics as diverse as lost wax/lost textile technology in Eurasia, the ceramics of the Bronze and Iron Ages in the South Caucasus (Rubinson and Sagona 2008), and, at ISAW, GIS in the South Caucasus (published workshop report) and, together with ISAW Professor Lorenzo D’Alfonso, Borders in Pre-Classical Anatolia and the South Caucasus.
Recent edited volumes include, in press, Borders in Archaeology: Changing Landscapes in Anatolia and the South Caucasus ca 3500–500 BCE, with Lorenzo D’Alfonso (Peeters Press) and, 2018, How Objects Tell Stories: Essays in Honor of Emma C. Bunker, with Katheryn M. Linduff Inner and Central Asian Art and Archaeology I. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers and The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World; series editors ISAW Research Associates Annette Juliano and Judith Lerner.
Dr. Rubinson co-curated the 2012 ISAW exhibit Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan, together with ISAW Associate Professor Sören Stark.
Recently, Dr. Rubinson was honored to be included as a “trowelblazer,” who are described on the home page as “women archaeologists, palaeontologists and geologists who have been doing awesome work for far longer, and in far greater numbers, than most people realise” [It’s a Britain based site!]. She was nominated by the Steppe Sisters, a networking group of women who do archaeological work in Asia.