Jennifer Burns

In 1998 Jennifer Burns earned an A.B. in history from Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry.⁠[1]

She then did graduate work in history at the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry, receiving an M.A. in 2001 and a Ph.D. in 2005.⁠[2]

She recalled that she wrote her doctoral dissertation on Ayn Rand in Berkeley’s graduate history program and said there was ample room for free inquiry there at the time.⁠[3]

From 2007 to 2012 she was an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia.⁠[4]

In 2009 Oxford UniversityUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry Press published her first book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, which drew on Rand’s private papers and unedited journals to examine Rand’s life, ideas and impact on conservative political thought.⁠[5]

She said at the time that most earlier writing on Rand had been either for or against her and written by people who had known her, and that there was no academic book on the subject.⁠[6]

In his review, Nick Gillespie wrote that Burns made the most of her access to Rand’s personal papers at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California, and was particularly sharp at analyzing how Cold War conservatives such as Buckley rejected Rand’s rationalism yet benefited from her popularity with 1960s college students.⁠[7]

Kim Phillips-Fein reviewed the book alongside Anne C. Heller’s Rand biography of the same year, finding that Heller relied more on interviews while Burns did more archival work and focused on Rand’s intellectual development and her place in postwar conservatism.⁠[8]

The Bay Area Consortium for the History of Ideas in America (BACHIA), launched in 2012, brought scholars together for workshops, talks and informal salons; she lists it among her collaborations. The Eighth Annual Meeting of the Society for United States Intellectual History, held at Stanford on October 13–15, 2016, is also listed among them.⁠[9]

From June 26 to 30, 2017, the Hoover Institution Library & Archives held its fourth annual Workshop on Political Economy, organized by her as a Stanford associate professor of history and Hoover research fellow; she had co-founded BACHIA and continued work on her Milton Friedman book during the workshop.⁠[10]

On March 2, 2022, she spoke at Claremont McKenna College as one of its 75th Anniversary Distinguished Speakers on Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and the ethics of capitalism.⁠[4]

In 2023 Farrar, Straus and Giroux published her Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, the first full biography of Friedman to employ archival sources, covering his collaborations with women economists such as Anna Schwartz and his role in creating a new economic vision and modern American conservatism.⁠[11]

Publishers Weekly called the book a robust if somewhat dry survey of the evolution of Friedman’s economic thought.⁠[12]

Kirkus Reviews described it as the first full-length biography of the 20th century’s free-market champion.⁠[13]

On November 15, 2023, she appeared on episode 197 of Tyler CowenTyler CowenTyler Cowen is an economics professor at George Mason University and chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center; in 2003 he co-founded the economics blog Marginal Revolution with Alex Tabarrok, he has written books including The Great Stagnation and Stubborn Attachments, and he hosts the podcast Conversations with Tyler. He appeared on the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2021.Open the full entry’s podcast Conversations with Tyler to discuss Friedman and Rand.⁠[14]

Samuel Gregg wrote in his review that the book is more an intellectual and political biography than a deeply personal one, and that it shows Friedman was more insecure than his public image suggested.⁠[15]

On November 29, 2023, the Hoover Institution Library & Archives hosted a talk on the book; she said it drew heavily on the Friedman collection at Hoover and could not have happened without the library and archives.⁠[16]

On January 11, 2024, Michael N. Peterson reviewed the book in The Daily Economy, calling it a definitive biography and summarizing its account of Friedman’s 1973 trip to Chile, in which he met Augusto Pinochet for only 45 minutes.⁠[17]

Martin Fridson recommended the book on CFA Institute’s Enterprising Investor blog while criticizing it for not noting Friedrich Hayek’s objection to the assumption of perfect competition and for leaving the time value of money out of its discussion of profits.⁠[18]

The book was a finalist for the 2024 Hayek Prize.⁠[19]

On September 18, 2024, New Ideal, published by the Ayn Rand Institute, ran a long essay by Elan Journo criticizing Goddess of the Market as, despite its claims to be non-partisan and deeply researched, an “anti-intellectual biography of an intellectual,” and arguing that it mischaracterized Rand’s view of government.⁠[20]

On January 19, 2025, she appeared on episode 457 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, introduced as a historian of ideas focusing on the evolution of economic, political and social ideas in the 20th-century United States; topics included Milton Friedman, the Great Depression, Keynesian economics, monetarism, stagflation, Javier Milei, cryptocurrency and Ayn Rand.⁠[21]

On July 28, 2025, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute announced that Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative had won the 2025 Age of Reagan Conference Book Prize over finalists by Aaron Bateman and James Graham Wilson; she was to speak at the conference at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley from July 30 to August 1.⁠[22]

On November 12, 2025, she was invested as a member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters at a ceremony in Washington, DC, together with Hoover fellows Steven J. Davis, Dan Edelstein, Stephen H. Haber, Stephen Kotkin and Paul E. Peterson.⁠[23]

On June 15, 2026, it was announced that the History of Economics Society had given that year’s Joseph J. Spengler Best Book Prize to her Friedman biography; the committee praised how she brought the many parts of Friedman’s life together.⁠[24]

As of October 2026 she is the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States History in Stanford University’s history department, studying 20th-century American intellectual, political and cultural history with a focus on ideas about the state, markets and capitalism in policy and politics.⁠[1]

She is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.⁠[2]

She has written for The New York Times, the Financial TimesFinancial TimesThe Financial Times (FT) is a London-based English-language business and financial news organization, known for its salmon-pink newspaper and its motto “Without Fear and Without Favour.” It was owned successively by the British Pearson group and Japan’s Nikkei Inc., and today digital subscriptions are its main source of revenue.Open the full entry, BloombergBloomberg L.P.Bloomberg L.P. is a global financial technology, data and media company founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981. It began by providing terminal services that deliver data, analytics and news to financial professionals, and launched Bloomberg News in 1990. Michael Bloomberg has pledged the vast majority of the company’s profits to his philanthropic organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies.Open the full entry and Dissent, and has discussed her work on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.⁠[25]

She is also faculty advisor to the Stanford Humanities Center Workshop in Religion, Politics, and Culture and a member of the Stanford Civics Initiative.⁠[19]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.jenniferburns.org (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

X: Public account: https://x.com/profburns (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

Stanford University: Official website: https://www.stanford.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

Hoover Institution: Official website: https://www.hoover.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[23]

University of Virginia: Official website: https://www.virginia.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[4]