#  Tsiona Lida 

 

 



   ![Tsiona Lida](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/2026-03/Tsiona%20Lida.png?itok=5BIx-BfQ) 

 



 





 

Tsiona Lida is a PhD Candidate in History at Harvard University. Through an intellectual history of Zionism, her dissertation investigates the role of emotions in structuring a sense of what belonged to Jews and where Jews belonged in the twentieth century. In doing so, it historicizes and theorizes a process of "entitlement" to Palestine—not simply as the accrual of title deeds, land, and abstract rights, but as moral conviction and a sense of right that came to enmesh and bind subjects and objects. The project brings together a broad array of Tsiona's interests in the history of philosophy, political thought, settler colonialism, political economy, and the interdisciplinary study of affect.

Before starting the PhD, she completed her undergraduate and masters degrees at the University of Edinburgh, studied at Harvard as a Kennedy Scholar, and worked as a researcher at Northeastern University's Interdisciplinary Affective Neuroscience Laboratory. In 2022-2023, Tsiona was a visiting scholar at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute Berlin. Her article titled "The Ascent of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Politics of Hope in Light of Walter Benjamin" was recently published in the *Jewish Quarterly Review.*



 

 

 





 

 

- ## Current Role
    
     [Graduate Fellow](/current-role/graduate-fellow)