DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Jesús Escobar arrived at Northwestern in 2008 and chaired the Department of Art History for seven years between 2010 and 2018. He is a scholar of art, architecture, and urbanism in early modern Spain and its transoceanic empire. Escobar’s 2022 book, Habsburg Madrid: Architecture and the Spanish Monarchy (Penn State University Press), examines government buildings and public spaces built and shaped in the Spanish capital between 1620 and 1700 from local, regional, and global vantage points. It won the 2023 Eleanor Tufts Award from the Society for Iberian Global Art and was published in Spanish by the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica in 2025. The book complements The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid (Cambridge University Press, 2003; paperback, 2009), Escobar’s exploration of the political and spatial evolution of Madrid from a secondary city of Castile to the seat of a global empire in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The first book won the 2004 Eleanor Tufts Award and was published in Spanish in 2008 by Editorial Nerea. Currently, Escobar is at work on Americans Abroad in the Seventeenth Century: People, Buildings, and the Space of Empire, a book project that narrates experiences with architecture in Latin America and Europe by American-born individuals, seeking to understand the multidirectional transmission of architectural knowledge across the Atlantic Ocean. With Michael Schreffler of the University of Notre Dame, he is also writing Architecture of the Spanish World, 1500 to 1800, a book under contract with Princeton University Press.

Professor Escobar is Editor of the scholarly book series, Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies, published by Penn State University Press. He is also President of the National Committee for the History of Art and an active participant in several professional societies including the Society for Iberian Global Art. His research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Clark Art Institute, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Currently, in 2024–25, he is a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Professor Escobar welcomes applications from prospective graduate students interested in architecture, urbanism, and cartography in the early modern, transatlantic Spanish Empire. He also welcomes proposals to study artistic exchange across the Spanish Habsburg world. These topics as well as general surveys of architectural history and Latin American art and architecture inform his undergraduate teaching. At Northwestern, Professor Escobar is an affiliate faculty member of Latin American and Caribbean Studies as well as Latina & Latino Studies.

Program Area: Architecture and Urbanism, Early Modern

Regional Specialization: Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean

Regional Interests:  Architecture and urbanism in the early modern Spanish Empire; Baroque art and visual culture; early modern cartography; art and empire 

Selected Publications

Jesús Escobar. Arquitectura y monarquía en Madrid, 1620–1700. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2025.  

Jesús Escobar. Habsburg Madrid: Architecture and the Spanish Monarchy. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022. Winner of the 2023 Eleanor Tufts Award

Jesús Escobar. “Enlightenment Erasure: The Lost Seventeenth Century in Spanish Architectural History.” Hispanic Research Journal 23, no. 5 (2022): 430–451. 

Jesús Escobar and Michael Schreffler. “Transatlantic Renaissance and Baroque Architecture in Spain and Latin America.” In The Cambridge Guide to the Architecture of Christianity, edited by Richard Etlin, vol. 2, 799–816. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Jesús Escobar. “Architecture, Race, and Labor in the Early Modern Spanish World.” Contribution to “Constructing Race and Architecture, 1400–1800,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 80/3 (2021): 268–269.

Jesús Escobar. “Philip II and El Escorial.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Art History. Ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann. New York: Oxford University Press, 27 June 2017.

Jesús Escobar, "Architecture in the Age of the Spanish Habsburgs," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 75/3 (2016): 258-262.

Jesús Escobar, "Map as Tapestry: Science and Art in Pedro Teixeira's 1656 Representation of Madrid," Art Bulletin 96/1 (2014): 50-69.