Rishona Zimring

Rishona Zimring joined LC’s English department in 1995 and has since authored Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination in Interwar Britain (Ashgate Press, 2013), as well as numerous articles and essays. The recipient of a 2015 Lorry Lokey Faculty Excellence Award for distinguished teaching, scholarship, and leadership, Professor Zimring has also received fellowships and awards from the Whiting Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Newberry Library. In addition to teaching introductory and advanced courses at Lewis & Clark, she has conducted many specialized research collaborations with undergraduate students throughout her teaching career, and has co-directed seminars on interdisciplinary scholarship (with Carrie Preston, Boston University) and the Bloomsbury Group (with Urmila Seshagiri, University of Tennessee) at the annual conferences of the Modernist Studies Association and Virginia Woolf Society. Professor Zimring’s recent publications include “Dance” in Vaughan Williams in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2024), “Katherine Mansfield and Reading” (The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield, 2020), and “Katherine Dunham’s Chicago Stage: Crossing to Caribbean Négritude” in the inaugural issue of Feminist Modernist Studies (2017). She is currently researching a book-length project titled Olive and Al: A Story of Partnership in Life, Law and Letters, with fellowship support from the American Philosophical Society, the New York Public Library, and the De Grummond Children’s Literature Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her recent conference presentations include a paper on Rachel Cusk and Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, and a paper on the Alpine expedition and friendship of Leslie Stephen and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Specialty

British and Irish Modernism, Postcolonial Literature, Literature and Visual/Performing Arts

Academic Credentials

PhD 1993, BA 1985, Yale University

Teaching

Spring 2025

ENG 316-01: Modern British and Irish Literature

GEND 300-01: Gender and Aesthetic Expression

Research

“Haunting London,” Katherine Mansfield and London (2024)

“Vaughan Williams and Dance,” Vaughan Williams in Context, Cambridge University Press  (2024)

“Of Modernism, Mimesis, Caves, and Mountains,” andererseits/on the other hand: Yearbook of German Studies (2022/2023)

“Katherine Mansfield and Reading,” Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield (2020)

“Katherine Dunham’s Chicago Stage: Crossing to Caribbean Négritude,” inaugural issue of Feminist Modernist Studies (2017)

“Katherine Mansfield in a Global Context,” review essay, Katherine Mansfield Studies (2017)

“Prufrock for the 21st Century,” Pleiades, (Summer 2015)

“Rethinking Mansfield Through Gaudier-Brzeska: Monumentality and Intimacy,”

Katherine Mansfield’s French Lives, Rodopi Press (2015)

“(Re)-making a Scene: Acoustic Space and Modernist Interiority in Larkin, Rhys, and

Brophy,” Jean Rhys: Twenty-First Century Approaches, ed. Patricia Moran and Erica

Johnson, Edinburgh University Press (2015)

Review of H.S. Ede, Savage Messiah, Katherine Mansfield Studies (2015)

Review of Susan Jones, Literature, Modernism, and Dance, Review of English Studies (2015)

“Ballet, Folk-Dance, and the Cultural History of Interwar Modernism: The Ballet Job,”

Modernist Cultures special issue for the 100 th anniversary of The Rite of Spring (2014)

“Mansfield’s Charm: The Enchantment of Domestic ‘Bliss,’” Katherine Mansfield

Studies, vol. 4 Special Issue: Katherine Mansfield and the Fantastic (2012)

“The Passionate Cosmopolitan in Salman Rushdie’s Fury,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46.1 (2010)

“‘The Dangerous Art Where One Slip Means Death’: Dance and the Literary Imagination

in Interwar Britain,” Modernism/Modernity 14.14 (2007): 707-727.

“Suggestions of Other Worlds: The Art of Sound in The Years,” Woolf Studies Annual 2002, 127-156.

“The Make-up of Jean Rhys’s Fiction,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 33.2, Spring 2000, 212-234.

“Conrad’s Pornography Shop,” Modern Fiction Studies, 43.2, June 1997, 319-348.

Professional Experience

2021-2023, 2024-2025 - Director, Gender Studies Program

2018- Faculty-Student Collaboration Grant, Lewis & Clark College

2015- Lorry Lokey Faculty Excellence Award, Lewis & Clark College

2015- Short-term research fellowship, Newberry Library, Chicago

2014- Mellon Faculty-Student Collaboration Grant, Lewis & Clark College

2013- NEH Grant, Summer Institute on “Making Modernism: Literature and Culture in

Twentieth-Century Chicago, 1893-1955,” Newberry Library, Chicago

2008- Program Leader for the Scotland Study Abroad Program

2006- Faculty/Student Collaborative Summer Research Grant, Lewis & Clark College

2005-2010, Chair of English Department

2005, Organizer, International Conference on “Virginia Woolf: The Art of Exploration”