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's book Living the Revolution: Italian Women's Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (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 (2003), which has been translated into Italian: Gli italiani sono bianchi? Come l'America ha costruito la razza (2006).
FEATURED LECTURE
My Rebellious Heart: Italian Immigrant Women's Early 20th C Anarchist Feminism
OAH Lectures by Jennifer Guglielmo
Explores how historical memory and storytelling have inspired and continue to empower the domestic workers' movement, past and present. This includes reflection on the ways digital humanities offer exciting new opportunities for collaboration between scholars and organizers in the movement.
Examines the activism of working-class Italian immigrant women anarchists in the United States as a window into the world of early twentieth-century transnational feminism. Emerging from a diasporic, multi-ethnic network of labor radicals, the women in this movement did not seek inclusion within the modern nation-state; nor did they rely on established trade unions or cross-class alliances. Instead, they created autonomous spaces for working-class and poor women to articulate their particular struggles and embody l'emancipazione della donna (women’s emancipation). Together, they asked a question that formed the heart of their politics: “Why does the pleasure of some have to create misery for many?”