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Lola Zappi is a historian whose work focuses on the history of social work and poverty in France in the 20th century. She received her PhD from Sciences Po in 2019 and was a Research Fellow at the French Institute for Demographic Studies in 2020-2021 and a CHEP-EHP Fellow at Harvard University in 2021-2022. She is an assistant professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.

Her first book, published in 2022 at the Presses de Sciences Po, analyzes the implementation of the French Welfare State in the interwar period through the encounter between social workers and working-class families. In two decades, social work moved from charitable activities to becoming an essential tool of public social policies. Therefore, social workers became the humane face of the Welfare State, impersonating the ambiguities of institutions both more accessible but also more intrusive towards the working-class population.

Her current project focuses on rural welfare in France, exploring how social workers accompanied the populations left on the sidelines of rural modernization from the 1950s to the 1980s.