Karen Parshall

Karen Hunger Parshall (born 1955, Virginia; née Karen Virginia Hunger) is an American historian of mathematics.

Parshall studied Romance languages, such as French, and mathematics at the University of Virginia, where she earned her master's degree in mathematics in 1978. She earned her PhD in 1982 in the history of mathematics from the University of Chicago under the direction of the historian Allen G. Debus (1926–2009) and the mathematician Israel Herstein. The subject of her dissertation is the history of the theory of algebras, especially the work of Joseph Wedderburn (The contributions of J. H. M. Wedderburn to the theory of algebras, 1900–1910). 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. Since 1988 she has taught the history of mathematics, and also mathematics and the history of science, at the University of Virginia, where she became in 1988 an assistant professor, in 1993 an associate professor and in 1999 a professor. She was a visiting professor at the Australian National University in Canberra and at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (1985).

Parshall's academic specialty is the development of mathematics in the USA in the late 19th century and early 20th century (particularly the Chicago School). As one example, she has studied the work of Leonard Dickson, who was greatly influenced by contact with German mathematicians such as Felix Klein at the time of the Columbian Exposition of 1893. She has also focused on the history of algebra. She edited the correspondence of James Joseph Sylvester published by Oxford University Press and wrote a biography of Sylvester.

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