Carolyn Zola

Professor Zola is a historian of gender, race, and labor in the early United States. Her research focuses on women who sold food in northeastern port cities between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries to offer a radical rethinking of the familiar story of American economic and urban transformation. A recipient of Stanford University’s Centennial Teaching Assistant Award, Professor Zola has received research support from the American Association of University Women, the Library Company of Philadelphia Program in Early American Economy and Society, the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the Stanford Humanities Center. Born and raised in the Bay Area, she worked in theater, studied at City College of San Francisco, and earned her B.A. in History at U.C. Berkeley. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2024.