Rishona Zimring

Rishona Zimring joined Lewis & Clark’s English Department in 1995. She is the author of Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination in Interwar Britain (Ashgate Press, 2013), as well as wide-ranging essays about modern literature, dance, visual culture, and cultural history. 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. Recent publications include “Dance” in Vaughan Williams in Context, “Katherine Mansfield and Reading,” and “Katherine Dunham’s Chicago Stage: Crossing to Caribbean Négritude.” 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 interest in creative partnerships has led to the recent publication of “Found in Translation: The Epistolary Friendship of Rosika Schwimmer and Ignazio Silone,” conference presentations on ekphrasis in the writing of Ezra Pound, Erich Auerbach, and Rachel Cusk, 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

Fall 2025

ENG 331-01: Major Figures: Modernist/Memoir 

ENG 410-01: Writing in the World

ENG 450-02: Senior Seminar

Research

“Group Dances,” The Edinburgh Companion to Popular Modernisms (forthcoming)

“Found in Translation: The Epistolary Friendship of Rosika Schwimmer and Ignazio Silone,” Feminist Modernist Studies (2025)

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

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

“Short Stories,” James Joyce Literary Supplement (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 100th 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”