Serena Zabin is a Professor of History, Broom Fellow for Public Scholarship, and Chair of the History Department at Carleton College. She is the author 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. The research for this book covers four countries and was supported by numerous grants, including the National Endowment for the Humanities (twice) and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Professor Zabin is also the codesigner of a forthcoming video game, Witness to the Revolution, in partnership with Professors Austin Mason (Carleton College), Andrew Williams (University of Wisconsin-Stout) and David Beck (University of Wisconsin-Stout). This immersive three-dimensional video game is an extension of her book The Boston Massacre: A Family History.
Professor Zabin has also written two other books about early America: Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741: Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal of the Proceedings (Bedford St. Martins, 2004).

Her most recent essays include “Towards a More Perfect Union,” opening essay for Building a More Perfect Union: Teaching the American Revolution and Beyond (National Endowment for the Humanities and National History Day, 2021); “Women and the Long American Revolution,” in The Companion to American Women’s History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), and “Empire and Protest,” in The Cambridge History of the American Revolution (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Professor Zabin regularly speaks with museums, cultural institutions, and libraries about her work on the American Revolution, as well as serving on scholar’s advisory boards for Revolutionary Spaces (Boston) and the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia).
Professor Zabin earned her PhD in history at Rutgers University and joined the faculty of the history department at Carleton in 2000.