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. In his work, he explores 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.
Pilgrim’s research has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The New York Public Library, The Renaissance Society of America, and The University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities. Before coming to Illinois, he was an NEH Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art at Vanderbilt University, where he was also co-organizer of the Environmental Humanities Seminar.
His first book Pastoral’s End: Art, Ecology, and Catastrophe in Renaissance Italy is forthcoming with The University of Chicago Press.
Research and publications
Selected publications
Pastoral's End: Art, Ecology, and Catastrophe in Renaissance Italy (forthcoming with The University of Chicago Press).
“Empathy for the Animal,” in Breaking the Silence: Methods of Writing Art History, Clark Studies in the Visual Arts, edited by Caroline Fowler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 186-195.
“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.
Teaching and advising
Classes taught
"Italian Renaissance Art"
"Global Baroque, 1600-1700"
"The Evidence of Art, 1600-1700"
"Art, Environment, and Empire in the Early Modern World, 1400-1800"
"Early Modern Venice: Ecology, Geography, Visual Culture"
"Introduction to Art History"