[1] Bard is most known for her work on the origins of complex societies and early states in Northeast Africa, the Red Sea trading network during the Bronze and Iron Ages, as well as the late prehistory of Egypt and northern Ethiopia/Eritrea.
They found evidence of four temples by Akhenaten, a heretical king who was the father of Tutankhamun and husband of Nefertiti.
She participated in excavations, directing projects at sites HG & SH in the Hu-Semaineh Region, Egypt, in 1989 and 1991, and at Ona Enda Aboi Zewgé and Ona Nagast on Bieta Giyorgis hill, Aksum, from 1993 to 2002, co-directed with Rodolfo Fattovich of the University of Naples "L'Orientale".
Among the artifacts at the Ona Enda Aboi Zewgé cemetery was a Roman wine jar from a vineyard in southern Gaul.
Later, from 2001 to 2011, she and Fattovich directed excavations at Mersa/Wadi Gawasis, Egypt, uncovering eight man-made caves at the ancient harbor site.
This article explored the contrasting polities in Egypt and Nubia in the fourth millennium BC from the perspective of the political economy and strategies to power proposed by the dual-processual theory, and the territorial expansionist model, which helps explain where and when the early state emerged.
[18] Furthermore, in 2022, she authored a chapter titled "Middle Kingdom Egypt and Africa", which was published in The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East, Volume II.