Research Bio
Diego Pirillo is a specialist of early modern Italy and Europe (1500-1800), and has an additional interest in Marxism and historical method. Reading the archive against the grain, his work strives to recover voices silenced by official narratives, including those of exiles, refugees, subaltern groups, and persecuted minorities. His current research focuses on 3 main areas:
- Refugees and forced displacement
- Colonialism, Indigeneity, and the Enlightenment
- Gramsci and Western Marxism
His most recent books are: Renaissance Refugees: Negotiating Displacement in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2026), in which he compares four displaced communities (Sephardic Jews, Spanish Moriscos, Italian philo-Protestants and English Catholics) and investigates the rise of refugee literature, considering how early modern refugees coped with forced migration, negotiating with governments to prevent persecutions and expulsions.
In The Atlantic Republic of Letters. Knowledge and Colonialism in the Age of Franklin (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026), he studies the transatlantic circulation of books and information in the long eighteenth-century and show that early American scholars envisioned and coordinated the colonial project. While placing the ‘taxonomic impulse’ at the center of the Enlightenment, he argues that various disciplines and intellectual practices, such as botany, antiquarianism, and bibliography, served as the instruments of European order, facilitating the classification and subjugation of North America’s nature and peoples.
He especially enjoy collaborative work. This has led him to co-edit several volumes, that variously rethink early modern history and literature, including: Carrefours des savoirs. L’Italie et la République des Lettres (XVIe-XXe siècles), co-edited with Vincenza Perdichizzi, Laboratoire italien, 2027; Troubling Literature: Engaging with Victoria Kahn, co-edited with David Marno and Jane Tylus, MLN, 2027; Braudel's La Méditerranée: Paradigms and Possibilities after 75 Years, co-edited with Rowan Dorin, Republics of Letters, 2026; Reframing Treaties in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West, co-edited with Isabella Lazzarini and Luciano Piffanelli (Oxford University Press, 2025); "Rethinking Catholicism in Early Modern Italy: Gender, Space, Mobility", co-edited with John Christopoulos, Religions, 2023.
He has held visiting Professorships at Dartmouth College and UCLA, where he was the 2024/25 Speroni Chair in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He has been fellow of Villa I Tatti (the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies), and his work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Hellman Foundation, the France-Berkeley Fund, the Houghton Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Newberry Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa.
Representative publications:
-“Collecting Indigenous America: Museums and Dispossession in Revolutionary Philadelphia,” in The Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, submitted.
-“Galileo and the Republic of Letters,” in Galileo’s Letters: Experiments in Friendship, ed. Paula Findlen and Hannah Markus and (University of Chicago Press, in press).
-“New England, 1648: Italian Refugee Literature and its Transatlantic Audience (1542-1702),” in Warren Boutcher (ed.), Europe in the World: A Literary History, 1529-1683 (Oxford University Press, in press).
-“How Knowledge Travels: Learned Periodicals and the Atlantic Republic of Letters,” Journal of the History of Ideas (2025/1): 75-107.
-“Negotiating on the Frontier: Indian Treaties and the Republic of Letters”, in Rediscovering Treaties: Peace Making and the Political Grammar of Agreements in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West (Oxford University Press, pp.).
- “Peace Movements in Renaissance Italy”, in A Cultural History of Peace: the Renaissance, ed. by Isabella Lazzarini (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 101-116.
-The Refugee-Diplomat: Venice, England and the Reformation (Cornell University Press, 2018), awarded the 2019 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies.
- “‘Questo buon monaco non ha inteso il Macchiavello”: Reading Campanella in Sarpi’s Shadow,” Bruniana & Campanelliana, 2014/1, 129-144.
- “Tasso at the French Embassy. Epic, Diplomacy, and the Law of Nations”, in Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare, ed, by Jason Powell and William T. Rossiter (Ashgate, 2013), 135-153.
-“Republicanism and Religious Dissent: Machiavelli and the Italian Protestant Reformers”, in Machiavellian Encounters in Tudor and Stuart England. Literary and Political Influences from the Reformation to the Restoration, ed. by Alessandra Petrina and Alessandro Arienzo (Ashgate, 2013), 121-140.
-Filosofia ed eresia nel tardo Cinquecento. Bruno, Sidney e i dissident religiosi italiani (Storia e Letteratura: 2010).
Research Expertise and Interest
Renaissance Europe, early modern Europe, Atlantic History, History of Books and Reading, colonialism, history of science and technology