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. His work explores how mobility, displacement, and colonialism shaped the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Italy, Europe and the Atlantic world. He has a secondary interest in modern Italian intellectual history with special attention to authors such as Croce, Gentile and Gramsci.
His most recent book is entitled The Atlantic Republic of Letters. Knowledge and Colonialism in the Age of Franklin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026). Studying the transatlantic circulation of books and information in the long eighteenth-century, The Atlantic Republic of Letters examines how early American scholars envisioned and coordinated the colonial project. While arguing that the ‘taxonomic impulse’ defined the Republic of Letters during the Enlightenment, the book shows that various disciplines and intellectual practices, such as botany, lexicography, antiquarianism, and bibliography, served as the instruments of European order, facilitating the classification and subjugation of North America’s nature and peoples.
His previous book The Refugee-Diplomat: Venice, England and the Reformation (Ithaca, Cornell: University Press, 2018, was awarded the 2019 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies. The Refugee Diplomat offers an alternative history of early modern diplomacy, centered not on states and their official representatives but around the figure of “the refugee-diplomat” and, more specifically, Italian religious refugees who forged ties with English and northern European Protestants in the hope of inspiring an Italian Reformation.
His current book project, entitled Renaissance Refugees: Negotiating Displacement in Early Modern Italy (under contract with Cambridge University Press), is a comparative study of four displaced communities and investigates how early modern refugees coped with forced migration, negotiating with governments to prevent persecutions and expulsions.
Prof. Pirillo 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 Fondazione Giorgio Cini.
Recent publications include:
-“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).
-“How Knowledge Travels: Learned Periodicals and the Atlantic Republic of Letters,” Journal of the History of Ideas (2025/1): 75-107.
- Braudel's La Méditerranée: Paradigms and Possibilities after 75 Years, Special issue for Republics of Letters, ed. by Rowan Dorin and Diego Pirillo, 2025.
-Reframing Treaties in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West, ed. by Isabella Lazzarini, Luciano Piffanelli and Diego Pirillo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025).
-“‘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.
For a complete bibliography of publications, click here.
