Irving Kenneth Zola (1935 – December 1, 1994[1]) was an American activist and writer in medical sociology and disability rights.
"[2] 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.
[1] 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.
For fifteen years, he held a joint appointment in the Florence Heller Graduate School for Advanced Studies in Social Welfare at Brandeis.
He edited "Ordinary Lives: Voices of Disability and Disease," a 1982 anthology that was praised as a diverse collection of fictional and personal accounts.