Trish Zimmerman is an Associate Professor of Practice in Religion at St Olaf College. She received her MA and PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School and BA from Gustavus Adolphus College, including work at the University of Heidelberg. Her research and teaching focus on the history of Christianity with particular emphasis on the medieval Christian mysticism, diversities of Christian thought and practice; feminist theology; theology of food; comparative mysticism and ecotheology.
She has served on the Council of the American Society of Church History and as a senior fellow for the Ford Foundation Difficult Dialogues project, and as co-chair of the Steering Committee of the History of Christianity group for the American Academy of Religion. She is North American series editor for Routledge’s Contemporary Theological Explorations in Christian Mysticism.
Representative Scholarship Includes:
"Riven. A Mysticism of Place in Times of Grief" Journal of Contemplative Studies (Spring 2025)
"To See Through a Glass Not Dimly. Angela of Foligno with Glass as Mystic Incarnation" with Nancy Thompson Publication of the Andrew Ladis Memorial Trecento Conference (2024)
"Quickening Holiness. Subversive Reading and Writing as Generative in Thomas of Cantimpré's Mystical Accounts" Syndicate Symposium on Rachel Smith's Excessive Saints (2022)
"The Gendered Impact of Covid: Or "How to Covid, Like a Girl" in The Journal of Lutheran Ethics (April 2021)
“Lives and Visions” Oxford Handbook to Mystical Theology (2020)
"The Mystic Traveler in a Global Spiritual Age" in Teaching Interreligious Encounters Eds. Marc Pugliese and Alexander Hwang (Oxford, 2017)
co-editor with Amy Hollywood of The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism (2012)
“The Power of Books and the Practice of Mysticism in the Fourteenth Century: Heinrich of Nördlingen and Margaret Ebner with Mechthild’s Flowing Light of the Godhead” Church History. Studies in Christianity and Culture (March 2007)
“Swimming in the Trinity. Mechthild of Magdeburg’s Mystical Play” Spiritus. A Journal of Christian Spirituality (Spring 2004).