Rhona Burns
She, her
Rhona Burns is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. She was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship as well as other awards from Bar-Ilan University and the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University to pursue her research project, titled “Tracing the inner roots of Israeli Conservatism.” She received her B.A and M.A in Hebrew Literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 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 doctoral thesis, titled “Respectable Utopias: Class and Society in Early Jewish National Thought”, focused on the formation of Jewish nationalism in light of ideas of class and status, and was approved in February 2023. Rhona’s focus of research is centered on investigating the influences of bourgeois civilization on the modern Jewish national idea as well as other types of nationalisms. This perspective shows the relative dominance of conservative and moderate-liberal outlooks within Jewish national thought, compared to radical, political and social approaches at that time. As a postdoctoral fellow, she intends to expand her investigation on this dominance and its implications for the creation and development of the modern Jewish national movement, politics and thought.
Rhona has also published two poetry books and is an associate editor and founder of the Hebrew literary review and publication, Eyruvin.
Her recent 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