Jennifer Guglielmo

I am a historian of labor, race, women, migration and revolutionary social movements in the late 19th- and 20th-century United States. I have published on a range of topics, including women’s organizing in garment, textile and domestic work, working-class feminisms, anarchism, whiteness and the Italian diaspora.

Most recently, I co-directed the public history project, “Putting History in Domestic Workers’ Hands” (2018-21), which received the National Council on Public History Award for Outstanding Public History Project (2022) and Honorable Mention from the American Studies Association’s Garfinkel Prize for exceptional work at the intersection of Digital Humanities and American Studies (2021).

For this multi-year project, I worked closely with scholars Michelle Joffroy and Diana Sierra Becerra, and organizers from the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) to develop history as an organizing tool to mobilize domestic workers on a massive scale. We received a grant of $2.7 million. Our project includes a digital timeline, two documentary films, 17 workshops, a website for curriculum facilitators, and short biographies and hand-painted portraits of 21 movement ancestors. Committed to language justice, the project is in five languages, including English, Spanish, Tagalog, Nepali, and Haitian Kreyol. The entire project can be accessed here. My research for the project focuses on the history of domestic work and organizing in North America from the 17th century to the present, to connect the multiracial and multiethnic histories that constitute this past.

For many years I have also been collecting and translating short essays written in Italian by immigrant women anarchists in early 20th-century New York City and northeastern New Jersey. I am now working with Sicilian artist Gabriella Ciancimino and my brother, artist Mark Guglielmo, to make these materials accessible to the public.

This project stems from my book Living the Revolution: Italian Women's Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), which received several national awards, including the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award for best book in U.S. immigration history from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Book Prize from the American Historical Association and Society for Italian Historical Studies, and Honorable Mention from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians’ First Book Prize. 

I am also co-editor of the anthology Are Italians White: How Race Is Made in America (Routledge, 2003), which has been translated into Italian: Gli italiani sono bianchi? Come l’America ha costruito la razza (Il Saggiatore, 2006).

I have received Smith College’s Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching and my courses include United States Since 1877: Race, Capitalism, Justice and A Decolonial U.S. Women's History, as well as colloquia on immigration, race and transnational cultures in U.S. history. I  also offers advanced research seminars on labor and working-class women’s history in the United States. Before joining the faculty at Smith College in 2003, I taught women’s studies and history at State University of New York, New Paltz, Ulster County Community College and William Paterson University.