Selected Awards:

South Bend Community Hall of Fame 2016

Keys to the City of South Bend 2006

Sagamore of the Wabash, Indiana’s highest honor 2006

Lilly Open Fellowship 1991;

Woodrow Wilson Fellowship 1965; Phi Beta Kappa 1964, Phi Kappa Phi 1964

Gabrielle tells stories about people, including herself, that show how the upheavals of history shape their lives. She has published eight books and over forty articles. On this journey she has learnt that we need to account for our pasts in order to live together with compassion and tolerance.

Born in Berlin in 1942, her father’s fighter plane was shot down in 1943. After her family was bombed out twice, they fled Berlin in 1945 and became refugees in a North German village.

This was the beginning of a string of migrations, including an Ursuline boarding school in Vienna, another on the Baltic Sea, stays in Hamburg and Darmstadt. In 1962 she moved to Urbana, IL with her mother and stepfather, enrolling as Freshman in English Lit. In 1964 she won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and earned an MA in Modern Drama from Columbia University. In 1968 she got her PhD from the University of London.

Gabrielle and her Scottish husband taught at the University of Illinois, where her only son was born. After a divorce in 1980, she moved to Indiana University South Bend, and also taught abroad.

Gabrielle found a home in South Bend, with her husband Mike, a sociologist turned sustainable neighborhood developer, and their cat Max. Her son is an English professor at SUNY Stony Brook.

Her favorite reading is about animals and trees.