She earned her PhD in 1982 in history from the University of Chicago under the direction of the historian Allen G. Debus (1926–2009) and the mathematician Israel Herstein.
[1] From 1982 to 1987, Parshall was an assistant professor at Sweet Briar College and in 1987/88 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
[2] As one example, she has studied the work of Leonard Dickson,[3] who was greatly influenced by contact with German mathematicians such as Felix Klein at the time of the Columbian Exposition of 1893.
Since 2002 she has been a corresponding member of the Académie internationale d’histoire des sciences in Paris.
"[7] In 2020, she was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in the Section on Mathematics.