Dr. James Pilgrim

Core faculty

Assistant Professor in Art History

Contact

jpilgrim@illinois.edu

Address

143 Art and Design Building
408 E Peabody Dr.

About Dr. Pilgrim

Biography

James Pilgrim (Colby College, BA; Williams College, MA; Johns Hopkins University, PhD) studies the ways in which images helped early modern Europeans make sense of the rapidly changing world in which they lived. He is particularly interested in recovering early modern artistic contributions to the emergence of a new environmental consciousness, a new global imaginary, and a growing skepticism about the reliability of the visual—themes that are as important today as they were in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His first book Pastoral’s End: Art, Ecology, and Catastrophe in Renaissance Italy is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press.

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Research and publications

Selected publications

Pastoral’s End: Art, Ecology, and Catastrophe in Renaissance Italy. University of Chicago Press, forthcoming in 2026.

“Polidoro’s Finish,” I Tatti Studies 28, no. 2 (2025): 165-194.

“Empathy for the Animal,” in Breaking the Silence: Methods of Writing Art History, Clark Studies in the Visual Arts (Yale University Press, 2025), 186-196.

“Jacopo Bassano and the Flood of Feltre,” The Art Bulletin 104, no. 3 (2023): 115-137.

“Rubens’s Skepticism,” Renaissance Quarterly 75, no. 3 (2022): 917-967.

“On Sorte’s Osservationi nella pittura: Water, Fire, and Landscape in Early Modern Italy,” Grey Room 85 (2021): 6-17.

“Moretto’s Map,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 62, no. 2/3 (2020): 297-309.

Art History