Donatella Calabi is Chair Professor of Urban History at the University Iuav of Venice (founded as the Venice University Institute of Architecture) and Visiting Professor at L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes of Paris, the British Academy, the University of Leicester, the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Sao Paolo, Brazil, as well as many other distinguished universities.

She is the former president of the European Association of Urban Historians and the current president of Italian Association of Urban History and team leader of the group on Cities and Cultural Exchanges of the European Science Foundation. Since 2002, Professor Calabi has been the director of the international PhD program on History of Architecture and Towns, Science of Art, and restoration of the School for Advanced Studies of Venice.

She has worked on town planning in nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is regarded as one of the foremost experts on the urban history of the Venetian Ghetto. Professor Calabi has published widely on the European city in early modern times and Venice in particular, including The City of the Jews (1991, 1996) and The Market and the City (revised edition 2004), and her work has been translated into many languages.