Rhona Burns

Rhona Burns

Postdoctoral Associate · Program of Jewish Studies, Cornell University

Rhona Burns is a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University, in 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 first monograph, Peasants, Sons of Kings: Class and Status in Early Jewish Nationalism (Hebrew, the Ben-Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, 2026), explores the vast influences of ideas of social class and status on the formation of Jewish modern nationalism, with a particular focus on proto-Zionism and early Zionism in the two last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. An adapted English version of the book is in advanced stages of preparation, tentatively titled Respectable Utopias: The Jewish National Idea through the Perspective of Class and Status.

Rhona’s current research focuses on building a more comparative approach to the understanding of Jewish nationalism, including comparing Jewish nationalisms with Arab and Palestinian cases of nationalism. She is generally interested in the connections between nationalism, citizenship, social class, and status.

Rhona has also published two Hebrew poetry collections — Rubble of the Earth (חצץ אדמה, 2017) and The Window (החלון, 2020) — along with 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.

Teaching

Cornell University, since 2024:

Contact

[email protected] · 411 White Hall, Cornell University