Karen House

Ms. Karen House is a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She is a former senior vice president of Dow Jones & Company and publisher of The Wall Street Journal. She also is the author of On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines-and Future (Knopf, 2013). Ms. House serves on multiple non-profit boards including the RAND Corporation, the advisory council for the Moody College of Communication at UT Austin and the Trilateral Commission. She began her career at the Dallas Morning News and joined the Journal’s Washington bureau covering energy, environment and agriculture in 1974. She was named diplomatic correspondent in 1978. In 1983, she moved to New York as assistant foreign editor, then foreign editor before becoming an executive of the International Group in 1989. She won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1984 for her coverage of the Middle East. A native of Matador, Texas, she received a journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin. She was managing editor of The Daily Texan and has been named to the Daily Texan Hall of Fame. She was a recipient of the University’s “Distinguished Alumnus” award (1996). She also has been awarded honorary degrees from Pepperdine University (2013), Boston University (2003), and Lafayette College (1992).