Overview
Rhona Burns is a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University, the Program of Jewish Studies. In 2023-2024, she was a Postdoctoral Fulbright Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Hebrew Literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she also taught. She then spent some years as an editor, writer, and journalist before continuing to write her Ph.D. dissertation at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, as a Ph.D. Presidential Fellow. Her forthcoming Hebrew-language book is tentatively titled “Respectable Utopias: Class Imagination and the Formation of Early Jewish National Thought” and is based on key ideas from her doctoral thesis (2023). Rhona’s current research focuses on better understanding the intrinsic system that links ideas of nationalism, citizenship, social class, and status, as well as understanding global politics and conflicts through these ideas.
Rhona has also published two poetry books (in Hebrew), numerous short stories, articles, essays, and critiques in various Israeli literary and news outlets, and served as an associate editor and founder of the Hebrew literary review and publication Eyruvin.
Publications
- “Politics as invention: On Theodor Herzl's ideal elites”, AJS Review: The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies 46, no. 2 (2022): 223-242. Doi:10.1353/ajs.2022.0041.
- “On the construction of national symbol in S.Y. Abramovitch’s ‘Susati’”, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 41, no. 1 (2023): 1-20. Doi: 10.1353/sho.2023.a903279
- “Class Imagination in Early Jewish Nationalism”, Iyunim 40, July 2024 (Hebrew). https://in.bgu.ac.il/bgi/iyunim/40/Burns.pdf