Irving Zola

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

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

Zola was one of the co-founders of Boston Self Help Center, an organization that is focused on advocating and counseling people with diseases and disabilities. From 1982 to 1987, he also served on the center's board as executive director.

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.

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.

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. During his time at Brandeis University, he worked with Everett C. Hughes, an American sociologist, who had a great impact on Zola's sociological perspective.

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.

He married Leonora Katz in 1957.Their marriage ended in a divorce after 16 years. He later married Judy Norsigian in 1981, and they remained together until his death in 1994.

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

Irving Kenneth Zola, born in 1935, in Newton, Massachusetts. He 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. He graduated from Boston Latin School and went on to enroll at Harvard College in 1956, and four years later went on to receive his Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University Department of Social Relations.