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.
