Jennifer Guglielmo

Jennifer Guglielmo is an award-winning author, teacher, and public historian. She specializes in the histories of labor, race, women, migration and revolutionary social movements in the late 19th- and 20th-century United States. She has 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, Guglielmo co-directed the public history/digital humanities project, “Putting History in Domestic Workers’ Hands” (2018-21), which received the 2022 National Council on Public History Award for Outstanding Public History Project. Guglielmo worked 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. They received a grant of $2.7 million, and the 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. Guglielmo’s research for the project has focused 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.

Guglielmo has 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. She is working with Sicilian artist Gabriella Ciancimino to make these materials accessible to the public.

Guglielmo’s book Living the Revolution: Italian Women's Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) 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. She is 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).

She is a recipient of Smith College’s Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching. Her courses include United States Since 1877: Race, Capitalism, Justice and Decolonizing U.S. Women's History, as well as colloquia on immigration, race and transnational cultures in U.S. history. She also offers an advanced research seminar on the history of domestic worker organizing in the United States. Before joining the faculty at Smith College in 2003, she taught women’s studies and history at State University of New York, New Paltz, Ulster County Community College and William Paterson University.