Donna Gabaccia

Career and research

Returning to the United States, after having learned both Italian and German, Gabaccia taught at Mercy College from 1982 to 1991. Her first book, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change among Italian Immigrants, 1880–1930 (1984) evaluated working-class, residents on a single street, focusing on class and community among the immigrants living there. Her initial output evaluated migration through the lens of gender and household composition, rather than the conventional focus on privilege, which forces the family unit into an unknown abstraction, and the narrow focus on individualism. By focusing on the family, she was able to evaluate the separate economic contributions of family members and shifting power dynamics between genders. Two of Gabaccia's groundbreaking books, which both integrated women into migration studies and demonstrated the importance of an interdisciplinary approach were Immigrant Women in the United States: A Selectively Annotated Multidisciplinary Bibliography (1989) and Seeking Common Ground: Multidisciplinary Studies of Immigrant Women in the United States (1992). These books laid the foundation for her "pathbreaking work on gender and migration", From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in the U.S., 1820–1990 (1994).

In 1990, Gabaccia initiated a world-wide research network, "Italians Everywhere" to facilitate migration study for the period 1870 to 1970 of emigration from Italy. By bringing together specialists with global expertise on a variety of locations, the network was able to evaluate the cross-cultural contribution to nation building and identity. Three edited volumes, Italy's Many Diasporas: Elites, Exiles and Workers of the World (2000) with Fraser M. Ottanelli; Women, Gender and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World (2002) with Franca Iacovetta; and Intimacy and Italian Migration: Gender and Domestic Lives in a Mobile World (2011) with Loretta Baldassar have been produced as a result of the interdisciplinary collaboration of the network. Abandoning nation-based analysis of migration, Gabaccia recognized that when people moved, it impacted both the place from which emigrants originated and the place where immigrants resettled. Gabaccia added depth to the understanding of migration, by showing that it was not a single national story; that destinations were not always finite but often immigrants moved back and forth between locations; and that assimilation was much more complex than a one-directional transfer of culture.

These works refuted the notion of transnationists, who believed that global migration was a contemporary 20th century phenomena, characterized by the utilization of technology to quickly assimilate but retain ties to their traditional homelands, which created a climate of dual allegiance that would ultimately undermine national socio-political organization. Gabaccia argued that the study of earlier migrations, not only showed that globalization was not a new phenomenon but that it was unclear whether it was either a permanent shift in cultural practices, sustainable over time, or whether it would lead to the demise of the nation-state. She pointed to the development of diaspora populations of earlier times of internationalism and cosmopolitanism, questioning whether transnationalism was an ideological belief held by migrants, or whether it had any permanency based on historical precedent.

From 1992 to 2003, Gabaccia was the Charles H. Stone Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, taking the Andrew Mellon Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh in 2003. Gabaccia left Pennsylvania in 2005 and until 2012, she held the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair of Immigration History at the University of Minnesota. During the same period, she was the director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. During this period, she continued steady production on works dedicated to migration patterns. She particularly focused on the history of women migrants and statistical analysis to bring deeper understanding to the gendered experiences of the past, including changing sexual standards. Her work also evaluated hierarchies of power and it fluctuations upon the agency among migrating people. She also studied the exchange of culture that is evident in food. Her book We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans, evaluates how the food of migrants became a part of the mainstream American diet.

After stepping down from the position as director, Gabaccia remained as a professor at the University of Minnesota for two more years, moving to Toronto in 2014, where she teaches in the history department at University of Toronto Scarborough. In 2013, her book, Foreign Relations: Global Perspectives on American Immigration (2012), was translated and republished in Japanese and won the Immigration and Ethnic History Society's Theodore Saloutos Prize in 2013. Her book, Gender and International Migration: From the Slavery Era to the Global Age (2015), written with Katharine Donato, was shortlisted for the American Sociological Association's Thomas and Znaniecki Book Award, winning honorable mention in 2016. In addition to her academic work, throughout her career Gabaccia has worked as a consultant and collaborator with groups of public school teachers, local and national museums, and historical societies to develop a collaborative understanding of knowledge and interpretations of the past. Among those, organizations were the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, the Levine Museum of the New South, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Public Radio, the United States Department of Labor and the Ward Museum of Toronto.