Karen is an acknowledged authority on the history of cabaret and small stage performance. In January 2017, Karen was given an adjunct professorship to teach her 2-part course, The Tenth Muse: The History of Cabaret from Montmartre to Manhattan as part of the Hutton House Lecture Series at Long Island University. LIU/Post is the home of the world’s only collegiate scholarship for cabaret, the Peter E. Kohler Scholarship in Cabaret, which Karen’s family endowed there in 2007.

On November 3, 2018, Karen flew to Chicago to moderate a roundtable discussion on the future of cabaret as part of the 2nd Annual Cabaret Connexion, a Paris-Chicago (sister city) collaboration created by Chicago-based chanteuse, Claudia Hommel.