James Pilgrim (Colby College, BA; Williams College, MA; Johns Hopkins University, PhD) is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

He 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.

Forthcoming publications include “Ecology and Evidence,” a critical assessment of the recent ‘environmental turn’ in early modern art history, which will appear in a special issue of Selva. He is also at work on a new book project, Invisible Worlds: Art, Uncertainty, and the Renaissance Globe, which examines the connections between Early Modern European painting, cartography, and global expansion.

Pilgrim’s research and teaching have been supported by fellowships and grants from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), 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 Kress Foundation.

In 2026-27, he will be a fellow at I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

E-mail: jpilgrim@illinois.edu