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 ecological 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 research has been published in I Tatti Studies, The Art Bulletin, Renaissance Quarterly, Grey Room, and the Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, among other venues. His first book Pastoral’s End: Art, Ecology, and Catastrophe in Renaissance Italy has recently been published by the University of Chicago Press. One of the first ecocritical studies of Renaissance art, the book offers a new interpretation of the work of the artist-engineer Jacopo Bassano (ca. 1510-92). He is currently at work on a second book that examines the connections between Early Modern European image-making, global expansion, and contingency and incertitude.
His research and teaching have been supported by fellowships and grants from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florenz, The New York Public Library, The Renaissance Society of America, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
He is currently the Rush H Kress Fellow at I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.
For additional information about his work, please click here.