Rishona Zimring grew up in Chicago, and went on to attend college and graduate school at Yale University, where she received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1993. Her dissertation, “Genealogies of the Modern Metropolis: Gender and Urban Space in Zola, Gissing, James, and Conrad,” was awarded a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities.

At Lewis and Clark, Rishona teaches courses on early 20th-century British literature, postcolonial literature, modernism and mass culture, the1930s, and authors such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Salman Rushdie. She enjoys the style of teaching and mentoring fostered in the small liberal arts college setting, including many collaborations with students on research and independent projects.

Rishona's scholarly work ranges over a number of late-19th-century and 20th-century writers, often returning to the social, political, and material contexts for understanding those writers’ works. She has published essays on Joseph Conrad and espionage, Jean Rhys and cosmetics, and Woolf’s use of urban sounds. Current projects include an investigation of modernism and dance, a study of violence in the fiction of Salman Rushdie, and helping to organize and host at the 15th Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf (June 9-12, 2005).

As a traveler, she has ventured from Ecuador to Japan to the Middle East, though her most frequent stops have been in England. Other interests include keeping in touch with her far-flung old friends, cooking, swimming, yoga, family history (she is the granddaughter of immigrants to Chicago from the Phillippines, Eastern Europe, and a farm in Missouri) and all aspects of learning with her young son, William.