Irving Zola

Irving Kenneth Zola (1935 – December 1, 1994 ) was an American activist and writer in medical sociology and disability rights.

Early life and education Zola came from a working class Jewish family. His mother was of Polish origin and his father Russian, both arriving in the US as immigrants as young children.

Career Soon after receiving his Ph.D. he briefly worked at Massachusetts General Hospital as a research sociologist before joining the Brandeis University Department of Sociology the next year in 1963, where he was the Mortimer Gryzmish Professor of Human Relations and taught until his death in 1994.

In 1982 Zola and a group of American academics founded the Society for Disability Studies. He was the first editor of Disability Studies Quarterly.

Books His best-known book, which first came out in 1982, is Missing Pieces: A Chronicle of Living With a Disability. It has been reissued in 2003.

The 'Dr. Irving Kenneth Zola Collection,' a repository of most of Zola's works, can be found at The Samuel Gridley Howe Library at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Zola had taught at Brandeis since 1963.

His writings included an autobiography, "Missing Pieces: A Chronicle of Living with a Disability," published in 1982. He edited "Ordinary Lives: Voices of Disability and Disease," a 1982 anthology that was praised as a diverse collection of fictional and personal accounts. A longer list of his writings are available here: https://irvingzola.com/howe.htm.

Death The cause of Zola's death was a heart attack; he died while being transported to the hospital in an ambulance on December 1, 1994.