Jill Pederson is Associate Professor of Art History at Arcadia University, specializing in European art with an emphasis on Italian painting, sculpture, and graphic work from the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries. Her research focuses on the intersection of visual, literary, and intellectual culture in northern Italy. Dr. Pederson is the author of Leonardo, Bramante, and the Academia: Art and Friendship in Fifteenth-Century Milan (Harvey Miller/Brepols, 2021). This book deepens our understanding of Leonardo da Vinci by providing contextualization for his first Milanese period (c.1482-1499). Although he has long been cast as an artistic anomaly, this study re-situates Leonardo within a specific scholarly network that helped to shape his own visual idiom. By suggesting that Leonardo derived inspiration from a wider group of artists, poets, and scientists, the book challenges prevailing ideas about his universal genius and contributes to a more complex understanding of an artist who influenced conceptions of creative practice for generations to come. Other research interests include art theory and criticism, Italian humanism, Renaissance historiography, early modern court culture, and gender studies.

Dr. Pederson is currently engaged in her second book project, which examines the artistic followers of Leonardo da Vinci within the context of cultural exchange and explores the proliferation of the Leonardesque pictorial mode across transcultural geographies.

Dr. Pederson received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University (2008). Before joining the faculty at Arcadia University, she taught at Johns Hopkins (2003–2004), Colorado College (2003, 2006­­­–2007), and Catholic University (2010–2011). She was also a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2007–2010). She is the recipient of the Pedretti Fellowship from the Renaissance Society of America, National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Scholar Grant, Fulbright Fellowship, Kress Foundation Fellowship, Renaissance Society of America Research Grant, Ahmanson Research Fellowship at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (UCLA), and a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society.