Department Chair and Professor of History, History
Serena Zabin is a Professor of History and Chair of the History Department (since 2020) at Carleton College; she is also President of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic. She earned her PhD in history at Rutgers University and joined the faculty of the history department at Carleton in 2000. She teaches classes in early America and public history, including an off-campus program entitled “Making Public History in Boston and DC.” Her other administrative experience includes directing the Carleton program in American Studies (2017–2020) and serving as the Broom Fellow for Public Scholarship (2019–2022).
Professor Zabin is the author, most recently, of the prizewinning The Boston Massacre: A Family History (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), which was also named an Amazon Editor’s Choice for History in 2020. She has served as a consultant for exhibitions, tours, and archives on the American Revolution for the Massachusetts Historical Society, Revolutionary Spaces, and the American Philosophical Society. She also supervised the creation of a podcast, developed by students in partnership with Revolutionary Spaces, called “Boston from the Balcony: Stories from Old South’s Congregants of Color.”
Professor Zabin is also the codesigner of a video game, Witness to the Revolution currently under development. Her partners in this project include Professor Austin Mason, director of the Carleton Digital Arts and Humanities program, and Professor Andrew Williams, Director of the Game Design and Development program at the University of Wisconsin–Stout.