He earned a PhD at University of California, Berkeley, where he was a student of Carl Sauer.
[4][5] Zelinsky made numerous geographical studies of American popular culture, ranging from the diffusion of classical place-names to spatial patterns of personal given names and the spatial patterning of religious denominations.
One of his most ambitious and imaginative projects was a provocative assessment of the impact of increasingly powerful personal preference on the spatial character of American society.
During the 1960s, along with Gordon DeJong, Warren Robinson, and Paul Baker, Zelinsky helped launch a population research center and coordinate an interdisciplinary graduate instructional program in population studies at Penn State and thus helped lay the foundation for what would become the dual-title Graduate Program in Demography.
In addition to his research in popular culture, he made substantial contributions in the fields of "population" and "folk geography".