Karen Elliott House is a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She is the former managing editor and publisher of The Wall Street Journal and senior vice president of Dow Jones & Company. In her 32-year career, she served as foreign editor, diplomatic correspondent, and energy correspondent. She is author of On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines—and Future, (2012).
Throughout her distinguished career, she has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for coverage of the Middle East (1984), as well as two Overseas Press Club awards, and the Edwin M. Hood award for Excellence in Diplomatic Reporting for a series on Saudi Arabia (1982). She has interviewed Saddam Hussein, Lee Kwan Yew, Zhu Rongji, Vladimir Putin, Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, Hosni Mubarak, Margaret Thatcher, Richard Nixon, Helmut Kohl, George H.W. Bush, the King Hussein of Jordan, and Yasser Arafat.
Karen Elliott House serves on various non-profit boards, including the Rand Corp, where she is chairman of the board, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Asia Society, the German-American Council, and Boston University. She received her BA in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and received the distinguished alumnus award in 2006. She studied and taught at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics and holds honorary degrees from Pepperdine University (2013), Boston University (2003), and Lafayette College (1992). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.