Research Bio
Diego Pirillo (Ph.D., Scuola Normale Superiore) is Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where is also affiliated with the History Department. He has been fellow of Villa I Tatti (the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies), and his work has been supported by institutions such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Houghton Library, the Newberry Library, the American Philosophical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. His work focuses on Italy, Europe, and the Atlantic world between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, with a strong interest in intellectual history, the history of books and reading, refugee studies, colonialism, the history of news and information. He has a secondary interest in modern Italian intellectual history with special attention to authors such as Croce, Gentile and Gramsci.
He is the author of three books: Filosofia ed eresia nell’Inghilterra del tardo Cinquecento: Bruno, Sidney e i dissident religiosi italiani (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 2010), The Refugee-Diplomat: Venice, England and the Reformation (Ithaca, Cornell: University Press, 2018, awarded the 2019 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies), and The Atlantic Republic of Letters: Knowledge and Colonialism in the Age of Franklin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), which frames early American intellectuals as agents of empire and shows that knowledge became a tool of colonialism, facilitating the dispossession of Indigenous peoples while silencing the Republic of Letters’ ties to the slave trade.
His current book project, entitled Renaissance Refugees: Negotiating Coexistence in the Age of Mass Expulsions (under contract with Cambridge University Press), is a comparative study of four displaced communities and investigates how early modern refugees coped with forced displacement and negotiated with governments to prevent persecution and expulsion.
Recent publications include:
-“How Knowledge Travels: Learned Periodicals and the Atlantic Republic of Letters,” Journal of the History of Ideas (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: Oxford University Press, in press).
-“Refugees, Diplomats, and the Reformation that Never Happened” in Giorgio Caravale (ed.), A Companion to the Italian Reformation (Leiden: Brill, in press).
–Reframing Treaties in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West, ed. by Isabella Lazzarini, Luciano Piffanelli and Diego Pirillo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press).
-“‘The excellent civil Policy of the Jesuits…deserves our imitation’: Anglican Missionaries, Native Americans, and the Jesuit Utopia of Paraguay,” in Early Modern Improvisations. Essays on History and Literature in Honor of John Watkins: (Oxford and New York: Routledge 2024).
–“Rethinking Catholicism in Early Modern Italy: Gender, Space, Mobility”, ed. by John Christopoulos and Diego Pirillo, special issue of Religions, 2023.
Research Expertise and Interest
Renaissance Europe, early modern Europe, Atlantic History, History of Books and Reading, colonialism, history of science and technology