at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1964, was awarded an MA in 1972 and earned her doctorate in 1977, becoming the first female Israeli geographer with a PhD and a pioneer of historical geography research in Palestine and Israel.

[3] Kark's PhD thesis was on The Development of the Cities Jerusalem and Jaffa from 1840 up to the First World War (A Study in Historical Geography).

Kark has written and edited around 30 books and published over 250 peer-reviewed articles on the history and historical geography of Palestine and Israel.

[4] More recently, she has published works about women and land ownership in both traditional and modern cultures across the Middle East.

In 2009, Kark and co-author Joseph Glass won an award for their research on the development of banking in Ottoman Palestine.