Carolyn Zola

Carolyn Zola is a PhD candidate in History at Stanford University where she studies gender, race, and labor in eighteenth and nineteenth century North America. Working at the intersection of social and cultural history, her dissertation explores the lives of female hucksters and peddlers who sold food in port cities, both in the regulated spaces of the markets and in the vernacular economies of the streets. Her work also analyzes the profusion of representations generated by the presence of urban women provisioners in public spaces in order to understand responses to these ubiquitous yet historically elusive sellers.

A recipient of Stanford University’s Centennial Teaching Assistant Award, Carolyn 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, before pursuing her PhD at Stanford she worked in theater, studied at City College of San Francisco, and earned her B.A. in History at U.C. Berkeley.